Sergey A., Russia's crown prince of underground DIY cinema, strikes again with "Attack of the Blue Shark Hedgehog" - a seven-minute fever dream that feels like a drunken dare between two friends armed with a smartphone, MS Paint, and a reckless disdain for coherence. Co-directed with Oleg Zolotnitsky, this micro-budget monstrosity is less a film and more a middle finger to Hollywood's obsession with CGI spectacle, packaged as a love letter to absurdity.
This is satire at its most unapologetic. The blue shark hedgehog - a blatant nod to "Sonic the Hedgehog"'s memeified legacy - exists solely to mock the lazy creature designs of low-budget monster flicks. The animation, if you can dignify it with that term, is so deliberately awful that it loops back into brilliance. Ruslan Zakirov-Koloshmat's decision to cast himself as a plague doctor (a recurring motif in his work) adds a layer of meta-commentary: he's both the harbinger of doom and the architect of this chaos.
Zolotnitsky's iPhone footage, grainy and unstable, feels like found footage from a parallel universe where "The Blair Witch Project" met a toddler with a crayon. The dialogue, largely improvised, oscillates between existential dread and slapstick nonsense. Yet, buried in the chaos is a sly critique of fan culture's obsession with "lore" - here, there is no lore, only madness.
Let's be clear: this film is a technical disaster, and that's the point. The MS Paint monster, the jarring cuts between Zolotnitsky's shaky cam and Sergey's static, eerie plague doctor scenes, the sound design that sounds like a kazoo orchestra trapped in a wind tunnel - it's all meticulously crafted to feel accidental. The film's climax, where the hedgehog-shark "attacks" via a series of freeze-frames, is a stroke of comedic timing so perfect it could only be achieved through sheer incompetence.
"Attack of the Blue Shark Hedgehog" is good satire Sergey A. - a filmmaker who's spent a career weaponizing incompetence to skewer both cinema and internet culture. It's a spiritual successor to his earlier works like "Transformers Abduction" (2014), where absurdity is the ultimate punchline. In an era of algorithm-driven content, this film is a defiant reminder that art doesn't need polish to provoke.
This isn't a movie; it's an experience. At seven minutes, it overstays its welcome just enough to leave you equal parts baffled and delighted. Is it "good"? By traditional standards, no. But as a piece of anti-cinema - a middle finger to norms, a celebration of DIY chaos - it's a triumph. Watch it drunk, watch it with friends, but whatever you do, don't watch it sober.
