Just to add another notch on his belt, Paul Bartel takes another beloved genre and injects it with his signature raunch and camp — this time around it's the Western... and I guess it's also a musical. Whatever Lust in the Dust is, it's certainly Bartel's queerest. Divine notwithstanding, it's sorta billed as a knock-off John Waters but it simply doesn't have his trademark transgressive depravity nor camp melodrama. It unfortunately doesn't feel much like a Paul Bartel film either, like where's the perversion? Divine does crush a bunch of men while they try to tongue-fuck her, so it's got that going for it, but these Bartel-isms are few and far between in this desert farce that promises so much in the opening and gives us so little by the end. Certainly an interesting experiment and I understand the small cult worship surrounding it, courtesy of Divine putting on a clinic, but it's a little disappointing coming from my King of Debauchery Sir Paul Bartel. A curiosity, but not essential.
Just to add another notch on his belt, Paul Bartel takes another beloved genre and injects it with his signature raunch and camp — this time around it's the Western... and I guess it's also a musical. Whatever Lust in the Dust is, it's certainly Bartel's queerest. Divine notwithstanding, it's sorta billed as a knock-off John Waters but it simply doesn't have his trademark transgressive depravity nor camp melodrama. It unfortunately doesn't feel much like a Paul Bartel film either, like where's the perversion? Divine does crush a bunch of men while they try to tongue-fuck her, so it's got that going for it, but these Bartel-isms are few and far between in this desert farce that promises so much in the opening and gives us so little by the end. Certainly an interesting experiment and I understand the small cult worship surrounding it, courtesy of Divine putting on a clinic, but it's a little disappointing coming from my King of Debauchery Sir Paul Bartel. A curiosity, but not essential.
