Winter of 2003, I'm sat on the edge of the mattress in my room with Ryan Adams singing about his Sweet Carolina from out the speakers behind me and with a cigarette 'tween my yap-flaps and with a lass from the technical college up the road stood at the door there, pulling her cardigan over her shoulders and running her hands through her hair, checking the reflection in the back-side of a Wildhearts CD.
"You look beautiful" I'm saying, and she does, with her Bruce Springsteen shirt and her bright-red moon-boots and her tartan trousers with the chains hung from her hip-bones to half-way down the avenue.
"Don't" she says. "It just makes it all the more… emo, the whole thing."
"Aye" says I, "Right enough."
"I'm sorry" she says, leaning down for to kiss me on the cheek afore she leaves, "I really am."
"Me too" says I. "Me too."
As she opens the door she says "You really should see it, y'know."
"I will" I sigh. "I will do that, right enough."
"Mean, it's a fucking classic."
"Aye. It is that, now."
Me and yonder lassie, manys a grand filth we'd planned, manys a curious shaming of science we'd been set for to conjure twixt the sheets. Manys a shocking gyration, manys a biological marvel.
Two steps shy o' the bed, we'd been, and she'd said "Bejeesus I'm gon' set light your knackers like the Dust Devil set light thon house on yonder plains."
With her tongue in my ear I'd said "Oh", I'd said, "I've never seen it."
She'd stopped, put her tongue back behind her teeth and said "What?"
"Dust Devil. I've never seen it."
A silence thick as the silence 'tween God's own thighs got to swelling round about the room.
Eventually she reached to the floor, lifted her cardigan and said "I'm sorry. It's a personal thing, I… I just can't sleep with a fella's never seen Dust Devil. It's a fucking masterpiece, I… I don't know how you can, just, like, woo a girl with patter all the colors of Tigon and Amicus and Hammer and then, when she's a wrist's flick removed from your willy just casually tell her you haven't seen the best British horror film since, like, whenever. Since The Wicker Man, maybe. Certainly since Hellraiser."
I stood there with the jaw all slackened and the tweeds at the ankles, the stripy pants all jutting now and again this way, then that.
"I'm sorry" she repeats. "I just… you're not who I thought you were."
I didn't leave the room for a fortnight.
Last week, some two years later, Dust Devil arrives in the post.
Now...
How Subversive Cinema went about releasing Richard Stanley's masterpiece is as follows...
By producing a glorious, five-disc behemoth of a set featuring Stanley's final, definitive cut of the film, a work-print version, three documentaries he's made for the BBC and various folks (one feature length, two half-hour affairs, all of them fantastic and dealing with voodoo, Nazis and the holy grail and post-Russian Invasion Afghanistan), a cavalcade o' extras, a short comic book, a fantastic booklet with no end of Stanley's notes on all of the films presented herein, and finally, a CD of Simon Boswell's wonderful score.
It's an incredible set, no doubt about it, retailing for the price of a regular ol' DVD, although it's limited to only 9,999 copies.
Article comments
1 - Iloz Zoc
Okay, you sold me on it! Will I get the girl, too, if I watch it? Hope, hope, hope.
2 - Duke De Mondo
Iloz Zoc, thanks for the comment, and i'm altogether certain you'll find this particularly bizarre wonder all the pleasing in the world.
As to the girl, i can only hope that works out for you. Maybe they'll release an even more spectacular box-set with The Girl alongside the comic book and the soundtrack and what have you.
...surely the special edition of Boxing Helena could at least entertain such a notion. it's so perfect!...
3 - Lisa McKay
Congratulations -- this review has been chosen as an Editor's Pick this week!