Dust Devil (1992)'s activity

Richard Stanley's Dust Devil seems to sell itself as a horror western, and it definitely has those trappings, but it takes place in modern-day Namibia, and that gives it a fresh coat of, umh, dust. But I mean that in a good way. With its dreamy dissolves and yellow grading (at least in The Final Cut), it reminds me most of Razorback, but its monster is stranger. A desert spirit that feeds on the hopeless, walking a country that's being reclaimed by the desert (the location used for the finale is amazing) and still reeling from a war. Stanley has taken a page from local lore to give us something we're not used to, and we have new rules to learn. The drama is carried by the twin efforts of Zakes Mokae as the cop tracking the supernatural serial killer and Chelsea Field as the devil's next victim, both exuding what the creature feeds on. Dust Devil is a mood piece, a portrait of a place lost in time, where the magical and the mundane intermingle... there's nothing quite like it, and I wish there were more (good) movies about monsters from folklore other than the over-used European classics.