Dandy Dust Not-Review

I am not a fan of the "so bad it's good" mentality. I hate how people go to these campy movies with preconceived ideas about the experience they're going to have; who, when faced with something totally outside their frame of reference for consensus reality, choose to scoff and laugh and close their minds, not even considering to actually sit with their thoughts and truly experience what is being presented to them on its own terms.

If you're that person, skip this movie.

Watched this movie at my local indie theater last year, and then when they brought it back in January 2024 for their best of 2023 set I had to rewatch it even though I never rewatch things. I figured I might never get another chance.

This movie is pure awesomeness. It's weird, it's queer, it's campy, it's scifi. I am not expert enough in music to articulate fully, but it's got sounds like from the videogame series Wipeout, Lo-Fi Trip Hop at least a decade before that was much of a thing, electronica, disco, metal, Persona 5-style nu jazz, and all of it is amazing. It's a shame this movie doesn't have an available OST or track list.

It's super low budget but it does some really cool things visually, like semi-transparent overlays of the actors over exotic hand-crafted sets, paper cutouts of tanks over cars, puppets in isometric view engaging in war.

The dialogue and character expressions are all so strange. The voices sometimes seem dubbed over. It takes you totally outside your frame of reference for what people are, how they behave; it makes it feel more scifi, but also more queer (in multiple senses of the word). These are humans who operate in totally alien ways.

There is a story, but it's very surreal, I didn't necessarily understand it the first time but on second viewing it was easier to follow, but it's not really necessary to understand what's going on. It's not a movie that needs to be fully understood, just appreciated.

It's sexy, but in a way that is totally orthogonal to heteronormative sexuality. It deals with some mature themes, there's some very graphic scenes, but it never feels exploitative and it always handles it matter of factly.

There's a character named Spidercuntboy.

If you can get your hands on it, or better, if you can find it in an indie theater, I would strongly recommend checking it out if you're at all into weird stuff.

I would love to get a full-length track of Candle Man's theme, it is so good.