2:01pm | Mondo Celluloid, in conjunction with Alfredo’s Beach Club, and with sponsorship by MADhouse and Gazzette Newspapers, is presenting a screening of the epic Science Fiction classic, Dune, as part of their ongoing series devoted to David Lynch.  

The free screening takes place tonight starting at 7 p.m. on the beach near Cherry Avenue and Ocean Boulevard. SuperMex will have food for sale, and Alfredo’s will be providing coffee, hot chocolate and other snacks. Attendees are encouraged to bring beach chairs and blankets, as it does get chilly.  

I went to see the film when it first was released in 1984. I remember buying my ticket. With each one, the AMC theater in the Marketplace handed out a photocopied story summary with a list of characters. I’d read the series in high school, and remembered Frank Herbert’s vivid epic well. It seemed strange that “crib notes” were thought necessary.

I remember thinking, too, that, aside from Sting, then lead singer for The Police, and the legendary character actor JosÈ Ferrer, the film lacked any big name celebrities. Linda Hunt had been a smash in “The Year of Living Dangerously” two years earlier, but nobody had heard of Kyle MacLachlan, who played the lead.  

David Lynch had garnered universal praise for his first mainstream film, “The Elephant Man,” a quaint and poignant period piece about the terribly disfigured John Merrick who, because of his appearance, was stripped of his humanity by Victorian society. Still, many were astounded that “Dune” would be handed over to someone who’d never worked on a production of such scope, cost and complexity.

After the spate of visually exciting Sci-Fi films that had emerged in the last several years, fans of the book were practically beside themselves and eagerly awaited the day that “Dune” would come to life on the big screen, though stories of cost overruns, delays, and endless revisions to the script continued to leak out.  

Also, everyone knew that Sting was not a great actor. He had a kind of smarmy charisma, and the camera loved him, but an actor he was not. Also, many physically shuddered at the thought of popular supergroup Toto creating the soundtrack. Still, Brian Eno had contributed, too, so maybe there was hope. (I discovered, later, that Eno had recorded just one short piece.)

The film finally came in at an estimated budget of $45 million. At that time, it was one of the most expensive films ever made. “Alien” cost $11 million and grossed more than $60 million in its first year of release. “Star Wars” cost $13 million and grossed nearly $196 million in its first year of release. “Dune,” despite the impressive marketing hype it received in advance of its release, fared far less well.  

Roger Ebert described the film as “a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time” and, later, named it “the worst movie of the year.” Most other reviews were negative as well. This led to a rather poor box office performance.

Even Lynch himself felt that the film was not as good as it could have been. The studio and producers insisted that he cut huge chunks from the film and add an introduction and narration. Some years later, an extensively altered release so angered Lynch that he had his name removed and replaced by the ubiquitous Alan Smithee.  

It is camp. It is cheese. It is quintessential 80s! Still, there’s something truly great about it. It is film on a grand scale, with beautiful special effects sequences, and ultimately it captures an other-worldly feeling.  

Even as I watched the film for the very first time in that AMC theater, I remember thinking that the sum is far greater than its parts. Lynch, even being completely inappropriate for the direction of this story, found a way to bring something of himself to it and, for that, it is worth seeing.  

More information is available at MondoCelluloid.com.