Day Thirteen: Dune (1984) (MotM 2019)

Everyone, I present to you, a bad re-telling of Dune.

Alright, so it starts out with this lady in space who talks about the plot of the film. During so, she starts fading in and out of existence for no reason. It might be because she wants out of the movie. It then cuts to a palace where a group of zombies bring in a giant black trash can so that the thing inside, a weird brain alien thing, can talk to the emperor of a futuristic kingdom. The alien tells the emperor that the duke of some planet has a son that needs to be killed. Without questioning any of it, the emperor puts a plan in place to send the duke, his wife, and his son to a desert planet for them to die. I can’t remember what the name of the planet is.

Meanwhile, there’s this bald woman who can read people’s minds and do all sorts of weird mind shit that’s never properly explained. She starts spouting prophetic gobbledygook about how the future is coming to pass and some sleeping beauty has to be awakened by drinking a glass of water. It’s very strange.

It cuts to the duke’s son, played by Kyle McLachlan, who is really fucking bad in this film. (Note: It is his first major film role.) He’s sitting at a table and staring at a wall like an asshole. Three men come up behind him, including Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who challenges him to a duel. The two have translucent tetris pieces envelop their bodies as they start fighting each other with kitchen knives. Not really sure what the hell they were for, but I guess they protect them? The Duke’s son (named Paul) gets the upper hand, but Picard shows that he had an opening during the final blow, so they both would’ve been killed in a real fight. I think the point of the scene was to make people want to play a Tetris fighting game.

Then Paul meets with the bald woman from before and she makes him stick his hand in a box and makes him feel phantom pain because she’s a sadistic bitch. Paul’s mom seems to be afraid of her. Then there’s a lot of talking and a bunch of boring stuff that happens that I kind of zoned out for. Sorry.

Paul and his family, along with a few other random people, arrive on the desert planet and fly around, when the Duke spots something within the ground. Oh, fuck, I forgot to mention but there’s this stuff called “Spice” that is apparently really important because it’s used as fuel for intergalactic travel. Anyway, the thing in the ground turns out to be the Alaskan Bull Worm™ from Spongebob, except it pre-dates Spongebob by, like, eighteen years so it’s not copyright infringement. They reach a spice-mining facility and the Duke tells everyone in it to climb onto their ship (about three or four people come aboard) before the worm comes crashing in. As the ship flies away, the worm comes out of nowhere and eats the facility from the ground up. It was very boring scary.

Then some really weird fucking scene comes up where the bad guys of the film show up in the form of a bunch of red-haired fatasses and… Sting from The Police. The worst one, the fattest one called “The Baron,” has a bunch of puss-y (careful wording there) bubbles on his face that a guy is… popping? Sucking juice from? And none of them really talk much, but they just laugh maniacally and look insane, only to have some bony dude come in and plant flowers in the corner. The Baron starts floating in the air while having a seizure, but eventually comes down onto the bony dude and just kills him to be a dick. What the fuck am I wa—

Back on the desert planet, there’s a scene where Paul comes into a room and a motion-detecting needle starts flying around and almost kills him, but then a little person walks into the room and it almost kills her. Then the base(?) they’re in comes under attack from the red-headed fatasses and a bunch of people who were tasked with protecting the Duke and his family actually betray them (they were planning to all along), but then some guy decides to help him, too, by pulling out the Duke’s tooth and replacing it with a poison gas tooth that, when he bites into and exhales, releases a deadly gas. Paul and his mother are kidnapped and transported to another planet, but along the way, Paul suddenly gets the ability to control people with his voice, which makes the captor take off his mother’s gag (she had a gag in, forgot to mention), which allows her to control the men with her voice, because she can do that.

This summary is really long and monotonous… anyway…

The Duke, in a delirious state, kills one of the Baron’s henchmen with his poison tooth, only to die immediately afterwards. Paul and his mother land on a desolate part of the desert planet and get attacked by the worm, only to have him run away because of the plot. Paul looks at the planet’s second moon and suddenly gains a shit-ton of knowledge for no reason, then he and his mother come upon an underground society that consists of people with glowing blue eyes and multiple reservoirs of water.

Some scenes play out where the bad guys start talking with each other. Boring stuff. The Baron fawns over Sting from The Police with only a cloth around his pelvis. Not really sure what that was all about.

Paul and his mother agree to teach these underground people their fighting ways, which are valuable, apparently, when Paul meets Rachel from Blade Runner, except she looks more like Daisy Ridley from Star Wars VII. The moment he lies eyes on her, the movie has him make his trillionth inner monologue (joined by multiple other characters’ trillion inner monologues) describing how beautiful she is, only to cut back to her, showing that she’s a 6/10 at best. (Still love you, Sean Young.) The two eventually fall in love and swear themselves to each other because who has time to develop a relationship when the universe is at stake? Paul’s mother becomes bald and mind-bending, then gives birth to a premature daughter, who grows up to be the most hilarious addition to the cast. Something about a five-year-old with glowing blue eyes talking serious shit just gets me.

The bad guys are shown again and they have one guy whose name and purpose I completely forgot about being held hostage. The Baron brings him a convoluted contraption with a cat and rat in it, stating to the hostage that, in order to live, he must milk the cat to serve as the antidote to the poison that’s seeping through his body. And then the scene ends.

Paul spends about five minutes training the people he’s come to know as his people, I guess, then proceeds to go outside and starts riding on one of the big worms outside. It’s not as exciting as it sounds. Afterwards, he starts babbling about how he can’t see his future anymore (he might be blind?) and that he needs a glass of water. “No!” Rachel from Blade Runner cries. “Every man who drinks a glass of water dies!” Paul then remembers when the bald woman from the start of the movie tells him that drinking a glass of water kills men, but that women don’t like looking at a void of nothingness that comes from drinking a glass of water. Despite this, Paul believes he is the chosen one, so he takes a big gulp (after Rachel tells him he loves him for extra effect) and starts to see a bunch of wacky shit. He screams, pisses his pants, then wakes up, looks up the stars, and screams: “Father! The sleeper has awoken!” Or some dumb thing like that.

By this point, I was so ready for the film to be over that I started to look around on social media sites just to keep myself entertained, so I wasn’t totally in tune with what was occurring. I guess Paul became a god after drinking the water, so he sends his little sister to the emperor’s palace to tell him that Paul’s forces would be there right now. Paul’s army then takes the area surrounding the castle and a big battle takes place, full of big worms and explosions and bodies flying all over. In the emperor’s chamber, the Baron is floating in the air like a balloon and Paul’s little sister pops him with needles and he starts swinging around like an idiot until he dies.

After proving victorious, Paul and his army face the emperor and his people in a big dining hall thing place. There, Sting from The Police starts growling like a rabid dog and challenges Paul to a fight to the death. After a bunch of dicking around, Sting from The Police falls from Paul’s blade being shoved into his throat (sucks for his music career). Paul is named the ruler of everything because the narration said that he’d just fix everything bad in time (BIG LMAO) as a bunch of storm clouds gather over the desert planet, bringing rain for the first time in a bajillion years. The end.

Now doesn’t that sound like a great movie?

Final Score: 3/10

The rating for all other films can be found at Letterboxd.

For more, check out the March of the Movies Archive!

Thank you for your time. Have a great day.