There's something almost fascinating - in the worst possible sense - about Mark Polonia's cinema. His insistence on continuing to make films after the death of his brother John no longer stems from artistic vocation, nor even from the trashy underground spirit they once brushed against together. What drives Mark now is an obsessive, childish, and profoundly sad loop, based on recycling a flashy idea and squeezing it dry, as if each repetition added something new. It doesn't. And the most worrying part is: he seems genuinely convinced that it does.
Cocaine Werewolf is yet another example of this creative decay - an opportunistic ripoff of Cocaine Bear that neither parodies nor comments on anything, but simply grabs the formula "animal + drug" and presents it as if that alone should be funny. And that is its most fatal flaw: Mark Polonia genuinely believes his films are funny. He thinks there's humor in poorly composed shots, in senseless dialogue, in special effects that insult the viewer's intelligence. He thinks low-budget equals intentional comedy. It doesn't.
Polonia's films aren't funny - not even by accident. They lack timing, irony, and any shred of self-awareness. There's no sense of rhythm, no construction of absurdity, no well-measured exaggeration. There is, instead, a profoundly earnest clumsiness: Cocaine Werewolf seems made with the sincere belief that it will make people laugh - and that makes it even more unbearable. Because we're not dealing with a failed comedy; we're dealing with a comedy that never existed, dressed up as a joke.
Polonia's obsession with exploiting trendy themes with minimal variations is yet another sign of his complete disconnect from cinematic language. Once he finds a "funny" title (or one he thinks is funny), he runs it into the ground: he's done it with Amityville, with sharks, with dinosaurs, with Bigfoot. And now he'll do it with Cocaine Werewolf. How many installments? Three, five, maybe eleven. It doesn't matter. Each one will be worse than the last, because his work is void of content or intent - just an empty echo of himself and an endless catalogue of recycled ideas.
This film fails on every level. Its only virtue - that it ends - comes far too late. It can't even be salvaged as a failed short film: Cocaine Werewolf has no spark, no core, no anything. It's a one-line idea that anyone with a shred of self-criticism would've thrown out ten minutes into writing. Polonia, on the other hand, turns it into seventy minutes of pure nothingness, believing he's made people laugh.
And perhaps that's the saddest part: not that his films aren't funny - but that he truly believes they are.
