DVD Review: Dust Devil - The Final Cut Five-Disc Collector's Edition - Page 2

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.

So aye, it arrives in the post, and it's everything Dust Devil-related a man could ever hope to have (except maybe for the original, severely butchered and tinkered with theatrical release version, but never mind that).

Hitting Play on the ol' DVD discaroo doohickey, I got to thinking about that lass from the opening paragraph, about how she'd said this was the best British horror flick since The Wicker Man, or at least Hellraiser. I got to considering Stanley's filmography, got to thinking about his work on the abysmal Island Of Dr Moreau remake from '96, a production from which he was fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer. I got to thinking about his 1990 picture Hardware, about a robot has some robot-fuck with a woman and some other things I don't really know anything about on account of I was 11 years old and my mum was in the room so I hid behind the sofa out of embarrassment.

I thought about how this was the Final Cut of Dust Devil, it even says so in the titles. I thought about how Richard Stanley had toiled and tilled for over twenty years to get this number onto the screens, fed his own money into it and settled not a moment until what was available for folks who cared to see, which should be most everyone, is the definitive, This Is What I Meant To Do version of his much maligned and mishandled labor of all-encompassing love, and not the version released by Miramax back in the day.

I thought about all of this, and then the dust-swept, sun-lashed, heat-skewed plains got to swelling on the screen and I could think about nothing that wasn't directly related to "Holy fuck."

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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