Lost Highway

 Year:  1997

Director:  David Lynch

Screenplay:  David Lynch and Barry Gifford

Starring:  Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Gary Busey, Robert Loggia

Running Time:  135 minutes

Genre:  Thriller, drama, horror

Jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Pullman) and his wife Renee (Arquette) are disturbed to receive a series of mysterious VHS tapes of their large Los Angeles house.  Fred is convicted of Renee's murder, and sentenced to death.  In his jail cell, Fred transforms into Pete Dayton (Getty), a mechanic who has seemingly no connection to Fred.  The authorities release Pete, who comes under the influence of violent gangster Mister Eddy (Loggia), and finds himself drawn to Eddy's moll, Alice (Arquette again).

David Lynch saw in the 1990s on a critical and commercial high, with his cult TV series Twin Peaks (1989-1991, 2017) at the peak (no pun intended) of it's success, and his film Wild at Heart (1990) winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.  However, Twin Peaks came to an end and Wild at Heart received mixed reviews and underperformed at the US Box Office.  Lynch's next film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), seemed like a guaranteed hit, however, the film, which leaned heavily into all the darkness, violence and weirdness that he was unable to put on mainstream TV in the early '90s baffled and dismayed both fans and critics, and was a commercial disappointment (except in Japan where it was a smash hit).   

The five years between Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway were the longest gap between film projects of Lynch's career to that date.  Lynch's inspiration came from coming across the term "lost highway" in Barry Gifford's book Night People (1992), and also the O. J. Simpson murder case.  Lynch, who knew Gifford after adapting his novel Wild at Heart, teamed up with the author to work on the film's screenplay.  The film is a "2 A. M." movie.  Whatever time of the day or night you put it on, it feels like it is two o'clock in the morning.  That kind of night time delirium, where the world feels like it made of shadows and ghosts.  Lost Highway does not offer up its secrets easily or willingly, working as it does with a kind of dream logic.  Among the cast, Robert Blake, who would be accused of murder in 2001, although he was acquitted, is genuinely terrifying as the "Mystery Man", dressed in black, with slicked back, black hair, white makeup and black lips and eyes.  Patricia Arquette appears as the mysterious woman in both Fred and Pete's lives (although as Renee she has dark hair, and as Alice she is blonde), who may in fact be the same person, or may not be.  Gary Busey appears as Pete's dad, and Richard Pryor has a cameo as Pete's boss.  Robert Loggia plays the seemingly affable but threatening gangster, in one of the film's standout scenes, he violently attacks a tailgating driver, yelling lessons on road safety while savagely pistol-whipping the man, in a scene that could have come from a Quentin Tarantino film.  Lynch regular Jack Nance appears in a small role as Pete's coworker, however Nance died before the film was released, following injuries sustained in a brawl outside a donut shop.

The film's baffling narrative, surrealism and graphic sex and violence, put off many viewers and critics.  However, it has its own beauty.  Lynch is a master at using sound and visuals, and this is a film that benefits hugely from being seen with the best possible screen and sound system.  Lynch started out as a painter, and the film has some beautifully composed shots, and a complex sound design, ranging from sinister low rumbling, and quiet whispering, to loud industrial rock from the likes of Marilyn Manson and the Nine Inch Nails.  If some of Lynch's films are dreams wrapped in nightmares, this is like a nightmare in hell with dreams of heaven.

  Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman in Lost Highway

  

Twin Peaks (2017 series)

Year of Release: 2017
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch and Mark Frost
Starring:  Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Michael Horse, Chrysta Bell, Miguel Ferrer, David Lynch, Naomi Watts, Robert Forster, Harry Goaz, Kimmy Robertson, Harry Dean Stanton, Laura Dern
Running Time:  18 one hour episodes
Genre:  Horror, crime, mystery

The original series Twin Peaks, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, ran for two seasons between 1989 and 1991 and centered on eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) investigating the murder of teenager Laura Palmer (Lee) in the picturesque small town of Twin Peaks.  The show mixed murder mystery, small town soap opera, cozy comedy and surreal fantasy.  Despite only lasting for two seasons, before being cancelled due to declining ratings, the show was hugely influential and is probably one of the biggest cult TV shows of all time.  The series was followed by a movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which despite being released to largely negative reviews and poor box office back in 1992 has come to be regarded as a major work.  For years Twin Peaks appeared to be pretty much dead in the water, though, with David Lynch going back and forth over whether there would be a return to the strange, small town.  Until a new eighteen part Twin Peaks series was broadcast on Showtime in 2017, every episode written by Lynch and Frost and directed by Lynch.  It could have been that the new Twin Peaks would be yet another exercise in the recent nostalgia boom. 

In fact, it was anything but.  If the original Twin Peaks broke the rules of traditional TV, this pretty much explodes the whole concept of traditional narrative television.  David Lynch has described it as an eighteen hour movie and it kind of is.  Most of the episodes end with a musical performance in a bar, otherwise the episodes just stop usually with no cliffhanger or real conclusion.  There is no real plot either, it's a collection of plot strands, which are picked up and dropped seemingly with no rhyme or reason, but most involve the reappearance of Dale Cooper after 25 years stuck in the bizarre netherworld known as the Black Lodge.  Or is it?  Is it Cooper's demonically possessed doppelganger?  Or is it Las Vegas accountant Dougie Jones (Maclachlan again)?  Or all three? Where as the original Twin Peaks was essentially a murder-mystery/soap-opera with surreal fantasy overtones, in this one the weirdness is central throughout the entire show.  Even scenes that seem to be relatively straightforward are filmed and performed in a strangely off-beat way.  It also opens the story up, taking place not only in Twin Peaks, but in New York, South Dakota, Las Vegas, Texas, and even New Mexico in the 1950s.  Frequently serving up some of the most bizarre and, at times, deeply disturbing images and sequences you are ever likely to see on your TV screen, this won't appeal to everyone.  I would recommend watching Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk With Me first, if you liked that then you will probably like this.  The series as a whole is David Lynch's masterpiece: a fascinating, maddening, funny, disturbing, scary, frustrating, mesmerising puzzle box that lingers in the mind, and makes me for one keen to watch it again to work out the clues that I have missed.

 

It only gets stranger: MIKE (Al Strobel) and Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks

Lost Highway

Year of Release:  1997
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch and Barry Gifford
Starring:  Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty
Running Time:  134 minutes
Genre:  Mystery, neo-noir, horror

Fred Madison (Pullman) is a saxophonist, and has a strained relationship with his mysterious wife Renee (Arquette).  The couple begin receiving a series of strange video tapes showing the exterior and interior of their house.  When Renee is savagely murdered, Madison is accused of the crime and sentenced to death.  However, on death row he transforms into young mechanic Pete Dayton (Getty).  One of Dayton's frequent clients is mercurial gangster Mister Eddy (Robert Loggia), and he finds himself becoming dangerously infatuated with Mister Eddy's seductive girlfriend Alice (Arquette again).  Then things start to get a little strange.

This is possibly one of the strangest films that David Lynch has made.  In fact watching it sometimes feels as if your watching two separate films spliced together.  The first part of the film, plays like a nightmare.  The whole thing is dreamlike, the camera slowly drifting through the Madison's cavernous, shadowy house, full of strange rumblings and odd lights, much like the camera in the videos they are sent.  The character's movements are slow, and their dialogue slightly off-tempo.  The second, much longer part of the film, plays very much like a nineties' neo-noir, at least initially, about a guy being drawn to a dangerous woman.  The scene where Mister Eddy beats and screams at a tailgater could have come straight from a Quentin Tarantino film.  The script was co-written by Lynch with novelist Barry Gifford (whose work Lynch had adapted in Wild at Heart (1990)), and Lynch was inspired to make the film by a phrase in Gifford's short story collection Night People (1992), and the opening scene in the film was based on an incident that actually happened to Lynch, where someone buzzed his intercom to inform him that "Dick Laurent is dead".  Lynch claims that he has no idea who the caller was or who Dick Laurent was.  This film won't be to everyone's tastes.  It's allusive, challenging, disturbing, deeply strange and offers up no easy answers to it's many mysteries.  However, if you pay attention you can come to an interpretation of the film.  There are some classic Lynch moments and characters here, particularly Robert Blake as the genuinely creepy Mystery Man.

  The Mystery Man (Robert Blake) in Lost Highway

         

Dune

Year of Release:  1984
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch, based on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert
Starring:  Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Jurgen Prochnow, Jose Ferrer, Kenneth McMillan, Sting, Sean Young, Everett McGill, Dean Stockwell, Patrick Stewart, Virginia Madsen, Max von Sydow
Running Time:  131 minutes
Genre:  science-fiction

This adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 science-fiction novel is generally considered a disaster, and right off the bat I have to say that it's really not that bad.  The story is set in a distant galaxy and involves two feuding families from two different planets:  The Atreides from the planet Caladan, ruled by patriarch Duke Leto (Prochnow), with his concubine Lady Jessica (Annis) and their son Paul (MacLachlan); and the Harkonnens from Geidi Prime, ruled by the sadistic and grotesque Baron Vladimir (McMillan) and his nephews, Feyd-Rautha (Sting) and the Beast Raban (Paul Smith).
The Atreides and Harkonnens are both desperate for control of the desert planet Arrakis (nicknamed Dune), a world devoid of natural water, riddled with deadly, giant subterranean sandworms,  and sparsely populated by a mysterious people known as the Fremen.  Arrakis is however vital, because it is the only source of the "spice melange", the most valuable substance in the universe, which can extend life and expand consciousness.  It's most important property is the ability to "fold space" thereby making interstellar travel possible.

This is a deeply frustrating film because there is a lot about it that is really great, and so much that is really bad.  It's worse problem is that it tries to condense Herbert's long, complex novel, which involves an intricate back-story into a too short a time, and this isn't a short film.  In the event much of the film's dialogue is purely exposition to advance the plot, with a lot of voice-over narration to explain what the hell is happening.  However it is a visually stunning film, with some of the most striking sets and production design that I have seen, and it does create a number of unique worlds and at it's best creates a genuine sense of wonder.  It also hasn't dated too much, except for some special-effects shots, and the very 1980s soundtrack by Toto and Brian Eno.  Watching it is a unique and unforgettable experience, with Kenneth McMillan creating, in Baron Harkonnen, one of the most memorable screen villains in history.  In fact, the Harkonnen scenes are genuinely nightmare fuel.  Again most of the good-looking characters are heroic, and evil is depicted by physical ugliness.  Francesca Annis is impressive as Lady Jessica, who provides the emotional heart of the film, but otherwise there are a lot of great actors standing around in fantastic costumes and sets, struggling to make an impression.

David Lynch famously repudiated the film, and dislikes even discussing it in interviews, and given the fact that he has never made any secret of the fact that he dislikes science-fiction, he was kind of an odd choice to direct it, but there is a lot of Lynch in it's visuals and style.

You may love it or you may hate it, but it is such a striking and unique experience, it is well worth checking out.

 Kyle MacLachlan versus Sting, while Patrick Stewart looks on in Dune                  

Blue Velvet

Year:  1986
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch
Starring:  Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, George Dickerson, Dean Stockwell
Running Time:  120 minutes
Genre:  Mystery, thriller, crime

This was the film with which David Lynch finally found his niche after the bizarre Eraserhead (1977), the striking success of The Elephant Man (1980) and the disasterous critical and commercial flop that was Dune (1984).

College student Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) returns to his home town of Lumberton after his father collapses in the back garden.  Taking  a walk trhough a patch of waste ground near his house, Jeffrey discovers a mouldering, ant infested human ear on the ground which he takes to the police.  The detective's daughter, Sandy (Dern), reveals to Jeffrey that the ear may be connected with an ongoing case involving a singer, Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini).  Hiding in Dorothy's apartment, Jeffrey soon discovers that she is being brutally tormented by the violent and deranged Frank Booth (Hopper).  Before long Jeffrey is drawn into their nightmarish underworld of sadomasochistic sex and violence.

This film opens with the credits, elegantly written in copperplate writing, over undulating blue velvet curtains.  We then see a succession of stylised images of a perfect all-American small town while Bobby Vinton sings the song "Blue Velvet" on the soundtrack, then the camera moves deeper into the neatly manicured lawn to reveal a seething netherworld of insects tearing each other apart.  This sequence encapsulates the principal theme of the film, that just below the perfect facade of small-town life, lurk violent undercurrents. 

Jeffrey Beaumont, the clean-cut all-American boy, has to choose between the nice, normal surface world, represented by wholesome, squeaky-clean Sandy, and the dark, violent, sexual underworld, represented by sultry, tormented Dorothy.  Jeffrey has a pretty big dark side right from the start ("Are you a detective or a pervert?" Sandy asks him fairly early on.  "That's for you to find out," he replies), however for the most part he prefers to watch from a closet until he is drawn in against his will. 

The film's most memorable character is Dennis Hopper's completely unhinged Frank, sucking in some unidentified gas through a mask, bellowing obscenities and threats, he manages to be both horrific and hilarious often at the same time.  Reportedly, Hopper rang up David Lynch, who he had never met, exclaiming "I have to play Frank!  I am Frank!"  Which apparently quite frightened Lynch.  Isabella Rossellini gives a powerful performance as the seductive and troubled singer.  After the film she and Lynch dated for a while.

Resonances from the film recur throught Lynch's subsequent work, most notably in the television series Twin Peaks (1989-1991) and the resulting film Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk With Me (1992) which also deal with the dark underbelly of American small town life.   

Blue Velvet is a funny, dark, horrifying, erotic and deeply powerful film.  It is one of the most impressive American films of the 1980s and is the quintessential David Lynch movie.

"It's a strange world."
- It certainly is for Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan)

Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) sings the blues in Blue Velvet

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Year:  1992
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch and Robert Engels, based on the television series Twin Peaks created by David Lynch and Mark Frost
Starring:  Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Moira Kelly, Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, Kyle MacLachlan
Running Time:  134 minutes
Genre:  Drama, horror, crime, surreal

The television series Twin Peaks ran to thirty episodes between 1989 and 1991, and at it's height was pretty much a cultural phenomenon with buckets of merchandise and endless references, parodies and homages throughout popular media.  The show centred on the investigation into the murder of small town high-school girl Laura Palmer (Lee) and the dark underbelly of American small town life which is stirred up by the murder.  With it's blend of crime drama, soap opera, comedy, surrealism and horror it was groundbreaking TV.  However the show suffered from steeply declining ratings and a drop in quality during it's second season, and was cancelled.  The show had been officially cancelled for less than a month when co-creator David Lynch announced the feature film.

The film serves as a prequel to the series.  The movie opens with the investigation into the murder of seventeen year old Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) by FBI agents Chester Desmond (Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Sutherland).  The murder is not solved and during the investigation Desmond mysteriously disappears.  The strange circumstances surrounding the case, including the bizarre reappearance of eccentric agent Philip Jeffries (David Bowie) and subsequent disappearance, lead Special Agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) to believe that the killer will strike again.  The film moves forward a year to the small rural town of Twin Peaks, and focuses on Laura Palmer during her last seven days alive.  On the surface Laura is the all-American Homecoming Queen, but in reality she has a severe drug habit, occasionally works as a prostitute and is threatened by an evil, abusive entity called "BOB" (Frank Silvera) who she fears has some link with her father, Leland (Wise).

The film was  ahuge commercial failure on it's original release, except, interestingly enough, in Japan where it was a box office hit playing to packed cinemas of mostly female audiences.  With it's complex narrative constantly referencing the series and obscure aspects of the show's mythology, it is very difficult for those unfamiliar with Twin Peaks to understand the movie, the film even has some references to the show's bizarre ending.  However, many fans of the series were very upset by the film, partly because many of the characters from the show were either barely glimpsed or completely absent from the film, and partly because the film lacks the series trademark warmth and humour which was always a counterbalance to the horror and darkness.  In this film, the horror and darkness is central and it plunges into areas of bleakness which the TV series could only hint at.  The original cut of the film was about five hours, and Lynch understandably had to cut a lot of material, and most of what was cut was the humour and warmth, and characters which Lynch felt were extraneous to the Laura Palmer story.  Also a number of the actors from the TV series did not want to appear in the film, due to the fact that many of them felt abandoned during the show's second season when Lynch's commitment to Wild at Heart (1990) meant that he had to take a much less hands-on role in the series.  As a result Lara Flynn Boyle declined to return as Donna Hayward, Laura's best friend, and her part was played by Moira Kelly in the film.  The series' star Kyle MacLachlan originally declined to take part in the film, but changed his mind on condition that his role was substantially reduced, as a result, Dale Cooper, who was the lead character in the show, only appears briefly in a few scenes.

Watching the film, you get the feeling, that this is Twin Peaks, as David Lynch would have liked it to have been.  Despite working in the confines of a prequel and thereby having to stick to the series continuity and mythology, the film is pure David Lynch.  The film is a dark and savage look at the heart of darkness in the neatly manicured lawns and white picket fences of small town America.  It also deserves points for turning the feature film spin-off of a TV show into an experimental, surrealistic nightmare which makes little concession to viewer's expectations.  This is a powerful and gruelling film, even though it does bear scars from the heavy editing - hopefully at some point an extended cut will be released.  Whatever, this is one of David Lynch's best.  The first time I saw it I had never seen any of the TV series, and so a lot of it completely went over my head, however I still loved it because it is so powerful and disturbing and so deeply strange.  By the way, David Lynch does make an acting appearance in the film as hard of hearing FBI chief Gordon Cole.

"Faster and faster... until after a while you wouldn't feel anything... and then your body would just burst into fire. And the angels wouldn't help you, 'cause they've all gone away..."
- Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) speculates on falling into space

Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) sees the light in Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk with Me          

Wild at Heart

Year:  1990
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch, based on the novel Wild at Heart:  The Story of Sailor and Lula by Barry Gifford
Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Willem Dafoe, Harry Dean Stanton, J.E. Freeman, Isabella Rossellini
Running Time:  120 minutes
Genre:  Road movie, drama, comedy, romance

This startling film plays like a surreal homage to The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Elvis Presley.  Sailor Ripley (Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Dern) are a young couple deeply in love.  However Lula's deranged mother, Marietta (Ladd), is determined to keep them apart.  After Sailor is released following a prison sentence for killing a man in self-defense, he and Lula decide to run off to California.  However, Marietta is determined to get Lula back and sends her private detective boyfriend, Johnnie Farrgut (Stanton), to track the couple down.  To make sure that Sailor is kept away permanently, Marietta contacts her other boyfriend, the murderous gangster Marcello Santos (Freeman), to send a hitman after the couple.  Meanwhile, Sailor and Lula find themselves trapped in a dangerous and very strange world, as they travel through a twisted, nightmarish version of the southern US.

The film opens with a match striking and then billowing clouds of flame filling the screen, and it doesn't let up from there.  There is never a dull moment in this hilarious, romantic, shockingly violent and deeply weird movie.  One of director David Lynch's trademarks is his mixing of extreme violence, disturbing surrealism, with often genuinely touching sentiment.  Lynch described this film as being "about finding love in Hell".  A long time fan of The Wizard of Oz, Lynch made the film one of the touchstones for the Wild at Heart script, and the film's sense of hope comes from Sailor and Lula's conviction that there is something better over the rainbow and at the end of the yellow brick road.  Lynch also saw Sailor as an Elvis Presley figure and Lula as Marilyn Monroe, and Nicolas Cage does perform two Elvis songs in the film.   Nicolas Cage turns in a superb perfomance as the snakeskin jacket clad Sailor (which in the film he claims "represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom"), and is perfectly complemented by Laura Dern as the tough and sexy Lula.  The love story between the two is genuinely affecting.  They make love, dance and have long rambling conversations about pretty much anything that happens to cross their minds.  Laura Dern's real-life mother Diane Ladd is memorable as the insane Marietta, for which she was Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

The film is very different from Barry Gifford's mostly dialogue driven novel.  Although the film is far more graphically violent than the book, the book is in it's own way darker, with quite a bleak conclusion.  Despite winning the Palme d'Or for Best Film at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, the movie was heavily criticised on it's release for the violence and weirdness, but in my opinion, the fact that this tender love story is set amongst all this horror, darkness and violence makes it shine all the more brighter.  Personally I love this film, it's sexy, romantic, violent, tender, funny and bizarre, and is probably David Lynch's most thoroughly entertaining movie.  The film's ultimate message appears to be that in an insane, twisted, nightmare world, the only hope for survival is love.


"This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top."
- It's hard to disagree with Lula (Laura Dern)

Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage hit the road in Wild at Heart           

              

Eraserhead

Year:  1977
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch
Starring:  Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Allen Joseph
Running Time:   89 minutes
Genre:  Surreal, horror, science-fiction

This film, which was produced over a period of five years, marked the feature debut of director David Lynch, and is now an acknowledged cult classic due to it finding an audience on the midnight movie circuit int he late 70s and 80s.  It's difficult to describe the film's plot, because there really isn't much of one, and that which there is doesn't really make a lot of sense.  Set largely in a run-down, industrial area of a nameless city, the film reolves around Henry Spencer (Nance), a quiet young man with very big hair, who is invited out to dinner at the home of his girlfriend, Mary X (Stewart), and her parents.  During the nightmarish evening, Henry is informed that Mary has given birth to a child ("Mom!  They're not even sure that it's a baby!" Mary wails).  The baby is a bizarre creature with no limbs, a long pencil-thin neck, and a head shaped like a embryonic sheep's head.  It's body is perpetually swathed in bandages and it cries constantly, refusing to feed.  With the small unhappy family lving in Henry's tiny, one-room apartment, Mary is driven to destraction by the baby's crying.  Eventually she storms out and returns to her parent's, claiming she just needs one good night's sleep.  Left with the baby, Henry experiences a variety of surreal events which may or may not be really happening.  Among other things he dreams that his head is being turned into pencil erasers, and he becomes fascinated by a female singer, with huge cheeks, performing on a stage behind his radiator.  Meanwhile, on a desolate planet, a badly scarred man wrestles with heavy levers.

Lynch had a grant from the American Film Institute to make the film, howeve the grant was not enough to complete the project and so Lynch worked on the movie intermittently using whatever money he could scrape together from various odd jobs and family and friends (including actress Sissy Spacek whose husband, Jack Fisk, was a childhood friend of Lynch's and appeared in the film as "The Man in the Planet").  The film is beautifully shot in black-and-white, and really has not dated at all partly because it seems to take place in a weird "no-time" and "no-space".  The sound design is also striking, with strange rumbling sounds constantly being heard in the background as well as strains of fairground style organ music (by Fats Waller).

I have to say that I love Eraserhead, and I have seen it many times before.  I think it is one of the most startling films ever made and there are images from it that will haunt you for the rest of your life.  However, as many people hate it as love it, and I can very easily understand that.  The film is so bizarre, with no real storyline to it, and no explanation for any of the events that occur.  It is also very slow-moving, and as such alienates many audiences and critics.  A friend of mine once told me that he fell asleep once with the TV on and when he woke up Eraserhead was playing, and he thought that he was still asleep and dreaming.  That is the perfect recommendation for me for the film.  It is one of the closest that cinema has ever got to recreating a genuine nightmare.  Nightmare in it's truest sense of those strange inexplicable images that flicker through the brain in the dead watches of the night, like broken transmissions broadcast from another planet.

You might love it.  You might hate it.  You will never forget it.

"We've got chicken tonight. Strangest damn things. They're man-made. Little damn things, smaller than my fist - but they're new!"
- Bleeding, moving roast chicken, it's what's for dinner at the X house.

Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) has a hair-raising experience in Eraserhead