chris@ISM780.UUCP (03/20/85)
Lust In The Dust, a review. I went into this movie with medium hopes. As a fanatic Sergio Leone fan, a spaghetti western parody sounded like a good idea. (Such a good idea in fact that i even wrote a treatment for one called Pastrami Realzop once) However, knowing the bunch that did this, I didn't have high hopes, I mean Divine? Turns out the movie is ok, but only ok. Tab Hunter does a very creditable Man With No Name, at least until he opens his mouth. The main bad guy is pretty good, if not actually nasty enough. There are some devastatingly funny sequences, the best being when Tab Hunter and the town bad man have a stare down. The good bits however are not nearly enough to carry the rest of it along. And I think I know why. The problem with doing a genre parody is that people who are familiar with the genre want lots of genre in-jokes but if the movie is all in-jokes, the general public won't come to see it. This dilemma results in schizophrenic movie making and that is exactly the results we get. Lust In The Dust has plenty of Leone references, but it is not nearly hard edged enough for the afficionados. The violence is exceptionally cartoony, and there is little nudity or grossness. In fact I don't see how it got an R rating! The language is pretty foul, but the rest of it is harmless. As an homage to the director who set new standards for on-screen crudity, this is pretty tame. If you promise gross-out humor in the add campaign, you really ought to deliver. There is nothing here even one tenth as bad as the banquet sequence in Indiana Jones. And yet it doesn't work as a general audience picture. Too many of the scenes are only funny if you know the scene they are refering to. (I was the only one laughing at many of them) There isn't that much intrinsically funny humor. The acting is pretty bad. The pace is too slow. (Sort of a compromise between Leone's "stately" pacing and the high speed that comedy usually demands) The bad acting leads us to the biggest problem. Divine. There are scenes where she (he/it?) is really pretty good. But there are many more scenes where she is really pretty bad. And there is lots and lots of time to look at Divine. Now I don't find Divine intrinsically funny. And watching Divine literally chew the scenery gets old after awhile. Yet the director seems to find watching Divine overact just fascinating. We get to see an awful lot of it. In this case less Divine would have been more. There is one surprising good point to the movie. There are four original songs, and they are all good. They are all written by the same team (names not remembered) and work suprisingly well. The background music is pretty good pseudo Morricone and in fact should have be highlighted more. In a way this movie is a big disapointment. They had all the ingredients to make a lethally funny Leone parody. But little fumbles here and there take all the steam out of it. If we could just go back to the start of shooting and change some things here and there it really could have worked. I suspect this movie is still a must see for the serious Leone fan but it really isn't all that good. My Name Is Nobody is fifty times better. Go see that (if it ever comes around) instead. chris kostanick decvax!vortex!ism780!chris