The weirdest flop of 1984. It’s impossible to adapt Frank Herbert’s epic novel as a two-hour film without making a giant mess—and David Lynch does exactly that, with unwanted help from the De Laurentiis people who took final cut away from him. The pace is slow, the plot unwieldy, the characters distant and none of the action helps. The best reason to see it today is because underneath the mega-budget production this is STILL a David Lynch movie. It may not have a point, but it does have a personality. Rather than another piece of Hollywood plastic, this feels like a good artist with two smaller films to his credit now swimming with some of the big sharks of the business and suffering a few nasty bites—but still living. Lynch’s eye for the grotesque is all over this film, most memorably in Kenneth McMillan’s boil-covered villain and a birth scene that could pass for color footage from Eraserhead. There are also the careful widescreen compositions and Lynch’s signature quick, dreamy montages full of fade-outs and slow-motion. As a director who’s often happy with ambiguity, he even seems to embrace at least some of the confusion here. If you’re a fan of Lynch’s work and the plot here loses you, just imagine that Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks (same actor) has wandered out far into The Black Lodge, lost his memory and found golden palaces and a desert with giant killer worms burrowing beneath.