Dust Devil: The Director’s Cut (1993)

Dust Devil: The Director’s Cut (1993)

Dir. Richard Stanley

Dust Devil is an amazing film hampered only by acting that at times is worse than a British soap opera. But if you can overlook that aspect of it, then you're in for a real treat that's equal parts artistic and engaging, beautiful and grim, resembling something birthed from the unholy union of a Clive Barker short and a Ray Bradbury nightmare.

An imaginative and expressively seductive use of filters and lighting imbue it with a reality that I imagine a drug-induced spirit journey would be like.

The dusty environment, with its orange hues like a mix of amber and blood, is the perfect setting. The entire film was shot on location in Namibia and even though it’s set in South Africa it feels like a Western put through an Australian blender. Weird, I know.

Hardware (1990)

Hardware (1990)

Dir. Richard Stanley

Over the years and after repeated viewings I've grown to really love Hardware even though the things that are wrong with it are probably equal in number to the things that are right.

By that logic, it should be little more than an average movie, but Richard Stanley put so much of himself into the film that it's as if the inner-workings achieved a kind of semi-life of their own, making even the flaws interesting viewing.

From the mystery figure in the opening scene, shown walking through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, scavenging for whatever he can turn into profit in a decaying economy, through to the city, itself a different kind of wasteland, right to the very end credits it's a film that feels strangely familiar but simultaneously, mysteriously unreal.

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's... (2014)

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau (2014)

Dir. David Gregory

Cult director Richard Stanley had a vision for an adaptation of an H.G. Wells story that he loved dearly. New Line Cinema had cold feet, a sharp knife and a clear view of Stanley’s back. Like frightened animals they struck.

The usurped writer/director is surprisingly calm about the whole affair, perhaps due to time having scabbed over the wounds.

He gives viewers access to the amazing pre-production art and storyboards he’d commissioned, on-set photos of the brief time he’d had in the director’s chair and airs his view on some of the disasters that befall the production.