Powerful

How sad is this?

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

I met Ingrid Pitt at a convention many years ago and found her to be engaging and entertaining. She took time to chat with me, more than I can say for some of the other celebrities at the event. I was sorry to hear about her death last week. It did focus my attention on some of her recent films that I missed.Let me start by saying that I can understand why this would be an easy film to dislike. It's confusing and unfocused. As other reviewers have pointed out, it's brutal in its assessment of organized religion. It's not much more flattering of America's current political circus. I can see how it would offend a lot of Conservatives, which may account for the IMDb score in spite of its excellent web reviews.That's not the reason I signed up for IMDb to write this review. I wanted to respond to the insulting notion that the only value Ingrid Pitt could bring to a movie was her nudity. This idea not only insults Ingrid's memory, it insults all women. The sad thing is that I've not only read this type of review on IMDb, but in professional reviews. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I don't see reviewers making fun of Jack Nicholson for getting "old and fat" and complimenting him for not taking his clothing off. It's pathetic that this can be used as the justification for disliking Ingrid's performance, let alone disliking a film she is in.In summary, Ingrid was great and the film was much funnier than I was led to believe it would be.

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".

I also attended the RI International Horror Film Festival and I can easily see why this film won best of show.SEA OF DUST is a wild romp of Horror, Comedy and beautiful scenery. A back in time tale of strange goings on. An increasingly wide spread illness with an overwhelmingly irritating side effect of people's heads exploding, brings a young Professor's apprentice; Stefan, to investigate. Along his travels, he decides to briefly detour and once again ask for his long time love's hand in marriage, only to once again be sent packing by her extremely stubborn father… Along the way "out of town" he comes across an ill girl in the road and delivers her to Dr. Maitland, (brilliantly played by up and coming Vincent Price like actor: Edward X Young.) Who fills Stefan in on the Evils a foot. Only the Dr. is insulted that he had called for the Professor and only received a boy in training…None the less, Stefan turns out to be much more than a common bystander. Horror Icon; Tom Savini portrays the ultimate religious torment monger; Prester John. Scream Queen; Ingrid Pitt comes out of retirement to give a stellar performance as Anna. Many beautiful and talented supporting actors seamlessly held the story together and helped to effectively move it along to the climax.Dark Religion and over the top, but fun and sometimes very original, gore scenes play heavily in this Hammer tribute flick. This stylish movie goes back and forth between flashbacks, surreal worlds, dreams and the character's reality.Horror and Gore aside; This is also a very Funny movie! Slapstick, tongue and cheek humor and dark comedy raise their heads among the dark story line. Like others have stated; this really is like three great movies in one. Very Entertaining and Original.

There I was on vacation when my host suggested we take in this B-Movie festival in Breda. I was resistant, as I hadn't gone on the trip to sit in a movie theater, but I've got to admit that I don't regret a second of this one (especially with Stephen Malkmus' contribution). It probably helped that I had no idea what to expect.SEA OF DUST starts out like a typical costume drama. We've got a young medical student going to help a doctor whose town is being destroyed by a crazy plague (which somehow involves exploding heads). On the way, he stops to visit his fiancé and gets thrown off the property by her father. Traveling on, he finds a girl lying on the road, another plague victim, and takes her along to the doctor's. Yawn, I thought. It all seemed pretty predicable.And then everything went crazy and it suddenly turned into a completely different film. Tom Savini shows up looking like Dracula, characters begin traveling to "the other side" of reality, and the dialog gets increasingly humorous.And just when I thought it had settled into a groove, the picture changes again, becoming really dark and bizarre. I won't spoil it for first time viewers, but there's an amazing sequence about hollow people, lots of chat about the abuse of religion by society, and some over-the-top gore effects. And did I mention Stephen Malkmus? This isn't a perfect movie (in case you haven't figured that out from its appearance at a B-Movie festival), but it's well worth the time for adventurous viewers. Great visuals, cool soundtrack, lots of interesting ideas. The acting is a little zany at times, but I think that's the point.Funny I had to go to Breda to see find an American picture that looked like a British horror movie. You figure that one out...