Dust Devil (1992): Deep Cuts #21

I recently had watched Sleepstalker to review for the site, and call me crazy, but I’m not sure if I had previously seen THAT movie when I was a youngin’, or if it was THIS movie. It didn’t bother me all that much, I mean, it wasn’t like I was losing sleep over the confusion, but when I noticed that this was directed by Richard Stanley, I had to watch it. 

Synopsis:

A woman on the run from her abusive husband encounters a mysterious hitch-hiker. 

IMDb: 6.2 

Rotten Tomatoes: 29% 

Tagline: He’s not a serial killer. He’s much worse. 

Richard Stanley directed the cult classic Hardware in 1990 and would follow it up with Dust Devil. In 1996, he would be slated to direct the big budget New Line Cinema production starring Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Brando was MIA during the production at times, and Kilmer was having all kinds of bullying issues and attitude problems. Stanley got blamed by the studio for their behavior, as not being able to control his actors, and after a nasty storm delayed production, Stanley crumbled under the pressure and asked to be released from the film.

Richard Stanley would not direct another film until 2019’s The Color Out of Space, a beautifully shot H.P. Lovecraft adaptation starring Nicolas Cage. 

With all this history in mind, the story of Dust Devil is equally frustrating. First, the film was hampered by filming in Namibia during its fight for independence. Then, his submitted 120-minute cut was trimmed to 95 minutes. Frustrated with key plot points being erased and causing confusion among moviegoers, he asked for the film to be restored to its full running time, but instead, they cut it further to 87 minutes. Several different cuts have been shown all over the world, including Stanley’s own Dust Devil: The Final Cut. The version I am watching is 1:48, so I am not sure where that falls on the spectrum. 

The brown and yellow colors are constant, with rare exceptions, for example, Wendy’s red VW Beetle. Everything is washed out, void of color, with dust blowing through every frame of the movie. It’s artsy, for sure, much like Color Out of Space, but whereas that movie was pretty to look at and jumped off the screen, this one just falls into the dull brown background. 

My God, Chelsea Green is incredibly attractive, but they have her covering up her abusive husband’s handiwork by having her dress like Joey Ramone, complete with bad hair, leather jacket, and Ramones sunglasses. Such an odd choice. Surely someone on set was a Ramones fan and pointed that out to the director. 

This movie is truly slow. Time does not move as fast as dust in the wind, instead, taking way too long to get to any semblance of a plot. I should have tried to find the 85-minute version, and not this bloated 105-minute film. It just goes on and on. The shapeshifting Dust Devil or “naghtloper”, feels very Native American, but this is an African movie, one I can’t help but tie to the Voodoo feeling of Serpent and the Rainbow due to their sharing of a primary actor.  

The movie plays a bit overdramatic, and I always catch hell from my friends when I use this word: pretentious. Yes, art is full of ego. Ego can make movies take themselves way too seriously. This is one of those films that seems to just be way too serious for its own good. It thinks it will be an Oscar contender, when it’s just a mediocre horror film.  

And I do not like the narrator. He speaks like a poet over the scenes, speaking in gibberish that is meaningless if you don’t care about the movie. He seems like he is from another movie, a western, with whistling music playing over the dusty desert, but he’s trapped in this movie, instead. 

For the record, this is not the movie I have seen before. This is dull and unmemorable, whereas Sleepstalker was fun. Neither of these will go on my must rewatch list, but Dust Devil is one that blows away in the wind, disappearing with the dust, out into the desert, never to be thought of again. 

 3.0/10 Stab Wounds  

 

 

 

About RetRo(n) 84 Articles
I like the 80s, slasher films, Italian directors, Evil Ed, Trash and Nancy, Ripley and Private First Class Hudson, retro crap but not SyFy crap, old school skin, Freddy and Savini, Spinell and Coscarelli, Andre Toulon, and last, but not least, Linda Blair.