Good start, but then it gets ruined

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Synopsis:Some weed in a costume (Troy Holland) is whining to some older bloke about some thing and Prester John (Tom Savini) gets mentioned. Prester John lives on the other side. I'm not sure what other side they mean but I might have drifted off at that point.The weed then goes to a big house full of costumed loonies where he tries to propose to some bird he loves and then gets thrown out by daddy loony. After leaving the house he finds an unconscious woman on the road and takes her to a doctor to be tied up, a service rarely offered in modern socialized medicine. Then he takes her home where her dad tries to kill him for tying up his daughter but he kills the dad and then some truly pathetic special effects take him to beach where he gets hooked and taken to a castle full of loonies presided over by Prester John who recruits the weed into his army as his general – amazingly rapid promotion especially since from then on all he bangs on about is stopping Prester John.This film is very badly written and the story is incoherent and making anyone watch should be considered a form of abuse. The acting is so awful that there are scenes littered with corpses and they can't even act dead convincingly.Tom Savini really is very hammy in this with a big purple cloak that he swishes around a lot. There is also Ingrid Pitt who seems very lost and confused and that wasn't much to do with her acting. I really cannot think of a single redeeming feature of this film and I cannot recommend it at allRating 0/10

The first movie at the Fangoria Festival in Vegas and the most challenging. It's not a movie for everyone. A number of the films that followed used predictable classic horror formulas to tell predictable stories. This picture seemed determined to do its own thing.Tom Savini showed some comic chops as the over the top villain. He dominated every scene he was in, flipping his cape about like Leslie Neilson playing Dracula. It was great to hear his explanation after the film. He had such a good sense of humor about the role.I was glad I didn't have too many preconceptions going in, because the movie offered a lot of surprises. The story was funny and profane and unusual. There was a lot of love lavished on the look. Most important, it had a weird edge to it. Unlike many of the movies that followed and tried to use a similar classic horror style, this was a movie that used its look for a purpose.There were a lot of movies at the Fangoria Festival with bigger budgets, but none that dared to be this different.

I watched SEA OF DUST at the Rhode Island Horror Film Festival in Providence. It was the Festival's featured film and won Best Picture out of I think a couple hundred entries. The director and a few of the stars answered questions after the showing. One star, Suzy Lorraine, was even hotter in person than in the film, and she was an eye catcher in the movie.This film is independent, yet it has a lot of cinematic touches that give it a quality feel. It even has an original classical style musical score.I am a Savini fan and he's the star villain here, in black cape, he's more of an evil force than a real person I think. He is sucking the souls out of people and using them as soldiers in a twisted attempt to establish his version of the Kingdom of God on Earth. In his view, Christ was all about suffering and Savini intends to make everyone suffer.The main story line that holds your interest is about a young doctor, Stefan, who is sent to investigate the strange events Savini is causing in an isolated town. He proposes to an aristocrat chick on the way but her SOB father tells him to get lost. Then he meets up with a strangely possessed but alluring country girl. I think she falls in love with him, but she also tries to kill him, as do a number of hot women in the film.I found the scenes shot in the woods to be the creepiest and most eye catching, with strange people along the road (the evil little twin girls scared the hell out of me).The film has a lot to it, too much to list. There is a lot of blood, torture and gore. Hot chicks licking blood off of guys' fingers. A terrified girl's head explodes. That was unexpected. Throats get slit. Some brutal stabbings.Then they play it for laughs sometimes, poking a bit of fun at the whole evil black forest genre.If you're a fan of Hammer films and Ingrid Pitt, it is fascinating to see her in this movie. She offs one of the leads by plunging a cross in his skull. Excellent. The guy who played "Multiple Miggs" in Silence of the Lambs is great in an axe fight.The movie is surreal and with the ending, I'm not sure the events happened or if they were in Stefan's head because of his rejection by his would-be fiancée. He returns in vengeance and that scene is brutal.The director also talked about the theme of religion being misused to back wars and killings. I can see that for sure, Savini's view of religion was scary.This was a strangely exceptional movie with some stars like Savini and Pitt, a lot of good supporting cast including hot babes, great gore scenes, action, and all the time you're wondering what the hell is going on and what is going to happen next.This deserves ten stars because it's an excellent independent film effort, I don't think it was low budget but it had to be way less than a big studio budget, and yet they managed to make something really attractive, unique and thought provoking.

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?"