Mike Huberty Just saw this at the Madison Horror Film Festival and was disappointed. A few shocking, funny moments (fisting the hollow Carla, a urinating harpy in the Dreamland) and two competing interesting premises (similar to New Nightmare with belief bringing a mythical character to life and also Lost Highway with a man living out a fantasy in his head) but had long stretches of no movement and incoherent plot development. Just because you use the framework of dreams or a mental fugue state doesn't make it Lynchian. You need the compelling visuals and creepy performances.Positive things: Dr. Maitland had real comic timing and all the girls were very cute. Carla's Father, Chalmers, and Ingrid Pitt looked like they were having some fun. And Tom Savini at least looked like he had his lines memorized and we couldn't see if he was just reading cue cards.I get the Hammer references, but it looks like the director realized the script was a snoozer and just added some shocks to try and get some laughs out of whatever footage he could put together. But they don't work because they're too few and far between and create an inconsistent tone. Condense this to 30 minutes of all the fun parts and you could have a surreal goofy short, but at feature length, skip it. It's not "so bad it's good" it's just "so bad it's boring".

cougarxavier Remember that friend in college who always insisted you rent the weirdest movie possible? This is the movie he would have made if he'd had the chance.I wish I could tell you exactly what Sea of Dust was about. It pretends to be the story of a doctor who gets sucked into weird goings on in the "Black Forest." He goes there to help, but ends up being caught between two young women, both of whom he seems to have a thing for. But that's just scratching the surface. This is the kind of movie where things just randomly happen...and not nice thing. People are constantly being whipped and stabbed. There's a pair of creepy little girls who appear to have walked out of The Shining. Tom Savini is some kind of imaginary religious figure who decides he doesn't want to be imaginary anymore. He's got a plan to take over the world by sharing Jesus suffering.On some level, this is a movie about sex. It's one without nudity, which was a disappointment, but there's no mistaking the intent. On another whole level, it's a stoner's paradise. Unexpected stuff happens so often that it stops being unexpected. By the time the doctor travels through his girlfriend's birth canal to be reborn, you'll just chalk it up to the crazy nature of the flick.On the down side, the film is pretty wordy. Some of the points are hammered home over and over. If you're watching it with a bunch of stoned friends, this might prove an asset.

mrstafty My husband and I had big disagreements about this film. He felt it was like the second coming and I felt it was kind of offensive.Like a number of other movies at the Rhode Island Festival it looked like an older movie. Instead of being a black and white silent movie like THE CALL OF CTHULU, it looked like a horror movie from the 1960s. It wass very colorful and as much as I hate to admit it, it was really beautiful to look at. The music also added to the feel. You don't hear stuff like that anymore.There were some problems with it though. In case my headline didn't tell you, it is terribly bloody. A girl's head blows off before you're a minute into the movie and that's just the start. The hero gets stuck in the throat with a hook, people have their skulls stabbed with knives and pitchforks, and I won't get into some of the other stuff that goes on. My jaw was hanging open for most of the time.The biggest source of our disagreement was that I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. I couldn't tell if the hero was imagining everything including the people around him or if he was giving in to the evil forces. This was another time when my husband said, "That's the whole point." I still think it was kind of insane.I might have given this movie a lower score, but the cast were so nice during the question and answer session that followed that I couldn't help but like them. They also helped explain some of the religious symbolism that was really bothering me.To be honest, I'm not even sure this was a horror movie. There were a couple of moments when I laughed out loud, a lott where I shrank down in my seat because of all the blood, and a few others where I shook my head and said, "Where did that come from?"

bobwildhorror I saw SEA OF DUST as part of a NYC screening audience several years ago. I enjoyed the film at that time, so I was a little confused by some of the amendments that had been made since. Perhaps it's my memory, but there seemed to be chunks of exposition missing from the version that was shown at the Rhode Island Film Festival. I'm really not sure which version I prefer, but I can honestly say that I found something to appreciate it both.Let me begin by warning everyone that this is not a popcorn movie. Although it's been promoted as a Hammer Films tribute, people expecting a showdown between Van Helsing and Dracula are going to be sorely disappointed. There's some cleavage, but no nudity (a staple of the British production house's later movies). And while SEA OF DUST is filled with gorgeous eye candy (it really is shot like a sixties film), and features Hammer starlet Ingrid Pitt, it's not like any of the company's pictures in tone or execution. This film is very dark, very confusing, and (at times) very funny. I don't remember the earlier version being quite as nutty as this one, but that's not a bad thing (especially the showdown in the Black Forest that plays like a Three Stooges short). And some of Ms Pitt's rantings are quite entertaining. It's like somebody wound her up and turned her loose.The uniqueness of this film doesn't lie with the borrowed details, though. It's in the ideas. As an occasional Sci Fi Channel viewer, I've regularly taken the network to task for its one-note variations on a theme (CGI monster kills, then gets destroyed). SEA OF DUST is so full of ideas that you start to trip over them after a while.But don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. If anything, I applaud these guys for making such an enterprising low-budget picture and for having the courage to pack it with so many concepts. It's not going to be a picnic for people who hate to think at the movies (you know who you are). But for the rest of us, those of us who are tired of the formula of modern horror films, the predictability, the lack of respect for the audience, this may just be your ticket.