While one of the more ‘normal’ movies by David Lynch, this is still pretty weird. Nicola Cage steps into the psychlorama of psychoness and gives it a spin. A little metal and a little Elvis makes the whole world go round.
Nothing like basically startin your film with Sailor Ripley (Cage) removing another man’s brainage matters using only his hands and some stone floors. It makes a statement. His girl Lula (Dern), sticks by him despite the rather short Penitentiary sentence. Her Mom? Not happy. Not even borderline psychotic, that lady pretty much full blown craaaazies and manipulatives. Young love has no logic though, and seems to be set to some kind of a Wizard of Oz theme here. Yeah. Well. It’s fuckin David Lynch.
Like a lot of his other stuff, a weird combination of tragedy, love story, odd characters and fucked up close-up camera shots all rolled into one. Willem DaFoe here as Bobby Peru? Golden. Harry Dean Stanton as the cuck? Sad. A bunch of other weirdos and plot points that are like painful tooth canals you shouldn’t stick your tongue into but you still do. And keep on tonguing it. Over. And over. Yet for all the oddities and rather lewd and dark plot points, it kind of balances out. Well, at least it doesn’t end on a fucked up note like Eraserhead. But few films can achieve that. This one is...almost not fucked up.
