I'd never seen the 1984 version until recently. I had low expectations, thinking I could watch this as a flawed curiosity, an early attempt that took too many liberties and bit off more than it could chew. But what I didn't expect is that it barely functions as a movie. Characters don't talk or behave in any rational way and instead they just go from weird scene to weird scene, speaking with their inner voice and occasionally talking exposition at people. Important things get time skipped or told instead of seen. Even scenes that should be tense or suspenseful never connect as anything but awkward and goofy. Every performance, every piece of dialogue and every scene seems designed to be off putting for no reason at all. The closest thing I could compare it to would be the offbeat Sword and Sorcery B-movies of the era. But even stuff like Krull is better than this. I know it's a David Lynch movie but I've seen him do straightforward narrative before, with sympathetic characters and plots you could follow. He just doesn't seem to be interested in of capable of doing that here. I wonder how much of that is because he lost his handle on it due to the studio, production difficulties, etc and how much was his own vision. Either way, the end result was bad.