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"The beginning is a very delicate time," says the Princess (Virginia Madsen) introducing the audience to intrigue spread across four planets. (The talking genitalia in the giant pickle jar has a term for the structure, "plans within plans.") The desert globe, the precious hallucinogen, "the Jihad." The messiah (Kyle MacLachlan) and his concubine mother (Francesca Annis) in the sands after the betrayal of the Duke (Jürgen Prochnow), the Emperor out of Jules Verne (José Ferrer) and his alliance with the foul Baron (Kenneth McMillan). "The spice must flow... The sleeper must awaken." Frank Herbert's gargantuan pulp abbreviated by David Lynch as a study in rotting splendor, Flash Gordon by way of late Visconti. Bloodlines and prophecies, waking dreams and echoing thoughts, all part of the alien consciousness. Eraserhead's industrial hellscape writ large and colored puke-green, set off against the Egyptian and Victorian elements of the mise en scène. "What do you call the mouse shadow in the second moon?" A striking comic-strip use of actors: Brad Dourif as Renfield, Sean Young with blue irises, carrot-topped Sting glistening in his metallic codpiece, Dean Stockwell's mustache-crusted lips chanting in close-up. Above all, a comprehensive soiling of the spotless Star Wars titanium, focusing on the grungy and the viscous, on boils and spittle and riotous spurts. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, Pal's Atlantis, the Lost Continent and Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes are evoked in the bitter complexity of Lynch's imagery, the subterranean behemoths are Rimbaud's "intimate hydras" but with roaring spiked maws. "It is perhaps better that you die in the innards of a worm." Verhoeven's Total Recall profits mightily from it. With Max von Sydow, Patrick Stewart, Siân Phillips, Linda Hunt, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Everett McGill, Silvana Mangano, Paul L. Smith, Jack Nance, Leonardo Cimino, and Alicia Witt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |