Dust Devil:The Final Cut(1993)
Directed By Richard Stanley
Never before have I seen a director's cut that's made so much of a difference to my perceptions of a movie. 
My first viewing of "Dust Devil" was the Wienstein cut, with about half an hour amputated for American audiences. 
My first impression was of a dismal borring serial killer thriller with supernatural overtones in a novel setting, featuring lots of half baked characters, and a serious shortage of suspense, horror, or general interest. 
What was cut from the film basically seems to be anything that would have been remotely interesting. 
The narration is subtracted, there is less music, less repeated shots of the moon, sky, and desert landscape, less peripheral views of the political and social context of the time and town, less time spent with the characters, a few dream sequences gone entirely, and a great sequence towards the end that takes place in a makeshift movie theater and recalls Ingmar Bergman's "Persona"(where for a brief momentm the movie itself falls out of joint), all get left on the chopping block in the US release.
My first impression was terrible, but my second viewing of the longer cut was like seeing the film with fresh eyes. 
Dust Devil is the story of an ancient demon who doesn't so much possess his host as it does become trapped inside of them. 
The demon only seeks to break out of the material world, an act he can only achieve through ritual murder. 
In his own words, "there is no good or evil, only spirit and matter. You are full of light, and I only have to make a small incision to let the light out.
I should have done this days ago, but I get lonely, forgive me I wont keep you waiting any longer". 
The demon can only kill the hopeless; those who truly have nothing and are either suicidal or have given up on life completely. 
He is attracted to a town called Bethany in the Namibian desert in south-west Africa, that is slowly collapsing on itself, to the point where even the sheriff has been paid to leave. 
The town is literally drying up, and the dust is as much an ecological terror as the demon that feeds on the he despair and hopelessness breeding in the town. 
The demon played by Robert John Burke (who was also the gruff Nordic mythological beast in the underrated "No Such Thing".) however is not the main feature of the movie. Dressed in his Sergio Leone cowboy trench coat and hat as a classic man with no name, "a violent wind which blows from nowhere"(though Stanley's final cut, even gives him a brief scene of pathos).
The plot involves a South African white woman named Linda (Chelsea Field) who has just left her husband in Johannesburg. We learn she was once a student radical but has lost her passion to a lifeless marriage, and is driving aimlessly towards "the sea" or towards suicide, whichever comes first. 
Linda picks up Burke, the nameless handsome hitchhiker, or imagines she does anyway (reality around Burke seems to collapse at times), who has just finished off two previous victims near Bethany.
The murders call for investigation, and the sherrif contacts Ben (Zakes Mokae) an old African detective who lost his son (and had subsoquently divorced from his wife), in some undisclosed "violence along the border". 
He drives through the desert listening to his ex wifes "whale song" recordings she forgot to take with her 15 years ago (there is a continous juxtopozition of ideas and sounds of the sea with the barren desert).
The two murders (there are only four in the film, and 3 depicted on screen), are ritual in nature, and so Ben enlists the help of my favorite character for narcissistic reasons, Joe the one eyed town shaman and projectionist at the drive in who narrates the film, and was scheduled to show "Bird With A Crystal Plumage" and "Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires" as double feature, before the trouble begins. 
He tells Ben that in order to stop the killings he will need to "stop thinking like a white man, and start thinking like a man" in order to open himself up to the rituals needed to trick and capture the evil spirit. 
Meanwhile Linda's husband is trying to track her down, failing at every turn, and only getting in the way of everything he touches as a bumbling and arrogant white male South African (not unlike Wikus from District 9, but sans redemption). 
What makes Dust Devil worth watching is the Stanley's milking the landscape and the sky for all it's shamanic glory (so we may better understand the demon as a force of nature itself), and Burke's alternately charming, cold, sensitive, or demonic performances.
Ben and Linda are the main characters and much of the movie is devoted to bringing them together and showing their mutual alienation and despair and how Ben's dedication to the murder case and Linda's picking up Burke the hitcher seem to give them both new sensations of purpose and meaning. 
The ecological blight of the dust, the economic famine of the town, and the psychological desperation of the characters and even Burke's desire to escape the material plane, are layered over (and form a commentary on) each other. 
The few moments which recall most directly a horror movie come few and far between the scenes of poetic narration, police procedural, and eye fulls of the Namibian desert and the dust devils(mini tornadoes) which dot it's landscape. 
Dust Devil is not the best horror movie Ive ever seen, but it is one of the first African films Ive watched as an adult (I have some hazy memories of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" from boyhood), and with the Final Cut (and only this cut) its one of the better more poetic horror films Ive come across. 
I liked it better than other poetic experimental horror films like "Sombre" or "Eyes Without A Face",(both French come to think of it) if only because it's visual and audio scheme more directly impacts and connects to its narrative. 
South African born Richard Stanley would go on to write and begin directing the remake of "The Island Or Dr. Mureau" but was fired early on thanks to the insistence of actor Val Kilmore. 
That movie and the next two Stanley would rightly turn down offers to direct, "Judge Dredd" and "Spiceworld", would all be nominated for the Razzies "worst picture of the year" award.
Since then he's made some short films, and documentaries. One of docs he's made is about Haitian voodoo from the practitioners perspective like Werner Herzog's "Bells From The Deep", and another about the Russian invasion of Afghanastan. 
He seems like a smart and talented enough director, and its a real shame what an abomination was made of this great film of his a story of horrors both personal and political, social and supernatural. 
Do not watch this unless you can get the Final Cut, its the only one worth seeing. 
Directed By Neill Blomkamp
A clever concept squandered, visually and conceptually.
When the film could explore a fascinating meeting of human and alien worlds, it reverts to easy suspense and action cliches. 
Regardless of whether or not this was inspired by South African Apartheid by the end it feels like every action film we've seen this summer, in a new locale (though these films love an "exotic locale"). 
Neill Blomkamp is a South African, which I suppose accounts for the "freshness" of the concept, perspective, and location, but he is also a director of the mini-movies you see between levels on video games like Halo.
He has some interesting short films up on YouTube, one of which was the basis for this film. 
As a short subject it worked fine, the jarring documentary realism next to faded cg effects was indeed novel, but rather than expand the story past the gimmick and pitch of "oppressed aliens", he opts for giving us one fight scene, to showcase his expertise with handling action scenes. 
This inorganic showing off, fills out the later half of District 9 as well, with bodies that go splat, and the finally alien looking aliens in the sci-fi film anthromorphised, like a talking penguin or any other animated pal. 
Needless to say the short film works much better.
Instead of taping into the raw psychological power of transformation like David Cronenberg's "The Fly", District 9, wants to tell us that inside of every alien freak is a white dunder-headed blue collar worker hopelessly and helplessly in over his head, which is all well and good, but bodies are not robot armor that can be put on and discarded, we wear them till the end (plastic surgery not withstanding).
I'm reminded of a scene in "Chasing Amy", were a gay black man in order to sell his comics, and establish credibility, leads an afro-centric tirade about Star Wars "Darth Vader; the blackest man in the universe, with a booming black voice, down with the force and all that good shit. 
And then in Jedi, what do you find out, inside he's a shriveled up old white man.
It's like they're telling us inside we all wanna be white."
Though dubious for Star Wars, this rational is very apparent in the end of District 9, where in the final scene, we view a "prawn" digging through garbage (who may be our hero post-transformer) and for the first time, can imagine superimposed under his insect eyes, the "human" looking back at us. 
Instead of confronting the otherness of the "prawns", and how hard it would be to understand creatures or peoples who DON'T think, act, look, just like whatever dominant culture you come from, were invited along on a buddy buddy crash course like Lethal Weapon or Rush Hour, accept with a man and a giant bug.
The film would rather show us the "prawn" version of a barbie doll, than address what gender might mean for insect monsters from the stars. 
United by laser canons and comic relief, the flying saucer to brotherhood flies on.
There was a movie in the 80's called Enemy Mine, were two enemies one human the other a reptile/alien/thing end up crashed on the same planet and to have put aside their differences and fight for survival, over the years coming to accept and depend on another, etc.
The man ends up having to raise the alien child as his own, but according to it's mother/father(they are an a-sexual race) condition that it be sure to memorize it's culture's history through an oath, which must be repeated to gain admittance in their world.
It's not a very good film, but it's a unique approach to a well worn alien vs. human scenario, and that alone has endeared it past it's marginal space in the dollar bin.
District 9 will be remembered long after Enemy Mine is forgotten but it won't be for any of it's ideas, but for it sfx. 
Though amusing at times, D9 doesn't know how to expand on it's central concept, and just relies on tried and true standards, Mech-Suits and some hazy memories of racial injustice for Bloomkamp, and savage beastly Nigerian cannibals straight outta King Kong's Skull Island for Peter Jackson.
It's disappointing because I like a few out there, had some high hopes this may offer something different, but it's basically more of the same. 
I did like that what appeared to the humans as the aliens, like roaches digging through garbage, was actually them salvaging parts from their own ships and recombining them with human refuse to build new devices and weapons.
One man's trash, etc. I even liked the evocation of "AIDS" panic as our hero is suspected of sleeping with the alien, and contracting a dangerous pandemic.
But instead of exploring the camp of District 9, it's peoples, culture, or relation to the human world around it through the mockumentary form, the film follows it's human lead down the path of splat and explode shoot em up, like bugs on a windshield.
It's clever at times, and wins points for aspiring, however haphazard and insipidly to social allegory of dispossession, and something more relevant than pushing action figures (I informed quite a few people what "apartheid" was, while discussing this in the months of it's add campaign, who otherwise might not have asked). 
But this novel 
