Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and The Missing Pieces

The Twin Peaks hiatus is over! Apologies for the delay, but as this film was rated 18 and the IMDB Parental Guidance section is somewhat graphic I deemed this would be unsuitable for my usual Twin Peaks viewing environment of my laptop on a public train, and it’s taken me several months to find an evening devoid of other more pressing activities in order to actually watch this film. But watch it I now have, and my thoughts I will soon distribute.

As with the first two seasons of Twin Peaks I went in knowing precious little of Fire Walk With Me, other than it was a prequel to the original show. My assumption was that this might follow Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) on the Theresa case, and whilst that was partially correct, this is far more about Laura Palmer’s week leading up to her washing up on the river bank encased in clingfilm, and my what a horrendous week she had. We’ll get there, though. For now, here’s my regular stream of consciousness from watching the film, albeit more edited this time due to the film’s length, otherwise we’d be here all day.

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Blue Velvet

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns from university to his smalltown home of Lumberton to look after the family hardware store when his father is hospitalised from a heart attack. After visiting the hospital, Jeffrey discovers a severed human ear in the woods, and begins investigating into its origin, leading him to team up with policeman’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) and lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) who seems connected in some way. Also connected is local gas-huffing psychopath crime lord Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) and his crew of cronies, but how deep is Jeffrey going to delve into the seedy world beneath the perfect veneer of suburbia?

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Eraserhead

I think this is David Lynch’s idea of a romantic comedy. Shot in stark black and white and sounding like it was filmed underwater or near a busy factory, we follow the bizarrely coiffed Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) through the trials and tribulations of an average young man – meeting his girlfriends parents for dinner, encountering a beautiful woman living in the same apartment building, watching a woman with hideously deformed cheeks dancing deliriously on stage, you know, the usual.

Coming across like a 90-minute montage of nightmares I would not advise watching this before bed. Henry and his partner’s baby has the appearance of a mechanised cow foetus (possibly because undenied rumours suggest this was what was used), the aforementioned dinner sequence involves a tiny roast chicken still moving, bubbling and bleeding on the plate, and a scene where Henry cuts open the deformed baby has it becoming a bile volcano, one of the most horrific images I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure what happened to Lynch growing up, but I damn well hope it doesn’t happen to me.
Choose life 2/10