Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Unfortunately this description applies to a large percentage of Kenneth Anger's body of work and this movie from 10 years after World War II is no exception. It runs for almost 37 minutes and is one of the longest films from the director. The thing I enjoyed most about it was the music (1978 Eldorado version), but that could not really make up for the uninteresting story that was going on. It dragged a lot and I can only really recommend this to huge fans of the director or people with a great interest in theater and mythology. This is one of Anger's most known works (he also acts in here, but not one of the major characters) and he was not even 30 when he shot this. Today he is approaching 90 and still making films. I hope his more recent works are better than his very early films. About "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome", not recommended.

Plot less short about some Greek gods (or something) getting together in a pleasure dome. There's no dialogue--only music which is supposed to match the images (I think). The color (in the restored print) is incredibly vivid and rich and some of the images are eye-catching but this is more boring and self-indulgent than anything else. The same images are shown again and again and AGAIN...it gets tedious rather quickly. With no plot or story to follow this gets to be a chore to watch. This might be of some interest to some since it has author Anais Nin as Astarte and artist Paul Mathison looking incredibly handsome as Pan. But, all in all, this is boring and pointless. It comes across as little more than director Kenneth Anger and his friends playing dress up. I give this a 4 for the imagery and color alone.

Anger's vision is a ritual in and of itself, committed to film to be enacted on each viewing. The colors were hypnotic at times. The homo-eroticism is simmering under the surface, mingled with so much symbolism that it is impossible to over-analyze it. Usually movies don't leave me feeling this awash in literally psychedelic thoughts, disconnected from the moment and yet fully a part of it's reckoning. Like the effect of Pulp Fiction on my subconscious vocabulary, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome left me thinking differently. There is some profound effect from watching it, I believe, pulling the viewer in as a participant.

I first encountered this work around 1967, in a period when I was seeing many underground films in New York and Los Angeles, some shown in progress by the makers themselves. It was a heady time, and my memory was of a richly textured, opulent work that was surely Anger's magnum opus up to that time.Last week, more than 3 decades later, I saw it again and was amazed at how inept and self-indulgent it was. The only thing holding it together is the appropriated sound track, Leos Janacek's masterful Glagolitic Mass, a creation that is far older than the film but has retained its genius. The visuals (like all of Anger's work, this is a silent movie with music) are little more than a pretentious thrift-shop costume show aspiring to pageantry, with little detectable underlying meaning or cinematic form.The notion of camp was not yet formulated in 1954, when IotPD was made, but the film inadvertently exemplifies the concept -- or was Anger really satirizing a self-conscious social circle along with a certain type of dilettantish cluelessness and muddled cinematic thinking when he made this? What a huge disappointment after mistakenly thinking so well of this movie for so many years!