Sea of Dust

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.

This movie is a homage to Hammer films, which means it was made by guys who watched a lot of Hammer films and just didn't get it.

What we see are a lot of period costumes and a typical period town where something monstrous is happening....

And if you stayed awake up to this point, you were doing better than I was...

Terrible acting, bad sound, seen better stuff on YouTube.

Ah, but I think I can fill out my requisite ten lines talking about Ingrid Pitt. Ingrid was a big Hammer star about the time Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were, and she had no compunctions about taking off her clothes to sell the movie. In this movie, she's old, fat, clearly hasn't worked in a long time and the only nice thing I can say is she DIDN'T remove her clothing. Because once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

SEA OF DUST is a ridiculous fairy tale featuring gallons of spurting blood, an elderly Ingrid Pitt, and Tom Savini nailed to a cross. Perhaps other, greater minds exist that can somehow stay awake long enough to figure out what's supposed to be going on.

There's sort of a Ken Russell-influenced, gothic goofiness happening while Savini runs around in a cape.

Meanwhile, the main character is in the woods, on the beach, then, in a house, back in the woods, on the beach, etc.

Wherever this movie is going, it sure takes its time getting there! Boring to the point of causing the viewer to self-immolate, this puppy should require a warning label!

Its Latin title is TURDUS ELEPHANTUS...

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 all

Rating 0/10