ViewGuide

Created Oct 08, 2009 08:38PM PST • Edited Feb 23, 2021 11:31PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Good 3.0

   Claimed a demented masterpiece by many, this soul-sick thriller oozes style, charisma and perverted action. Sadly, it lacks continuity, is overly affected and revels in juxtaposing drug addled wickedness with small town goodness.

   Worth seeing – if you have a strong stomach – for Dennis Hopper’s inimitable villain, Isabella Rossellini’s tortured torch singer, and as genius auteur David Lynch’s most accessible movie.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Dennis Hopper channeled sick personal experience into his performance as a townie crime lord whose tastes run to amyl nitrate driven rough sex. Ugly but compelling.

   Isabella Rossellini defiles herself for the cause of cinematic art as a blackmailed nightclub singer with a taste for masochistic sex. She wears it well. Plus she’s suitably effective as a torch singer. (She ain’t no Michelle Pfeiffer lounge singing atop a piano with the Fabulous Baker Boys, but she’s more than adequate.)

   Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern are brightly effective as clean cut teens who get in over their heads.

   Dean Stockwell’s a hoot – in eyeliner no less – as a karaoke singing cat-house proprietor.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    OK 2.5

    Lynch’s original cut was twice as a long as the two hour film ultimately released. One can only assume the details necessary to make the story work fell to the cutting room floor since the plot has more holes than a bullet ridden corpse. Missing details aside, the film remains overly stylized for mainstream tastes.

    Famously, this is the film where Lynch uses gross closeups of insects living just below manicured lawns as metaphors for the human depravity he projects behind wholesome exteriors. Be impressed. Very impressed.

11. Direction Good 3.0

    Some scenes are amateurish – such as the candlelit dream sequences and the headlight lit road sequences – and others are stilted.

12. Play Pretty Bad 1.5

    Dinging the Screenplay mostly because of the copious missing plot details and/or odd plot elements.

13. Music Great 4.0

    Great repetitive use of the title song. Roy Orbison’s In Dreams also receives a memorable rendering.

14. Visuals Very Good 3.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Horrid 3.9

    Zinging F-bombs, rough sex (some might call it rape) and a severed ear (somewhat the worse for wear, natch) are among this movie’s edgy highlights.

17. Sex Lewd 3.6

18. Violence Brutal 3.5

19. Rudeness Vile 4.7

21. Reality

    Glib 1.6

    Circumstantially surreal in High Lynch style.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.8

23. Biological Glib 1.4

24. Physical Natural 1.0