David Lynch’s remarkable first film, made in 1976, still looks like a minor masterpiece, mixing Gothic horror, surrealism and darkly expressionist mise-en-scène.
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09/12/08
Eraserhead (1976)
90
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Reviews Counted:40
Fresh:36
Rotten:4
Average Rating:7.9/10
Consensus: David Lynch's surreal Eraserhead uses detailed visuals and a creepy score to create a bizarre and disturbing look into a man's fear of parenthood.
Theatrical Release:12-09-2008
Synopsis: Director David Lynch's feature-film debut is a masterpiece of the macabre and grotesque. Reportedly a reaction to the news that he was about to become a father, Lynch's ERASERHEAD follows a... [More]
Starring: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Joseph Allen
Director: David Lynch
Reviews for Eraserhead
David Lynch has "cleaned up" his freaky feature debut, but don't worry - it's still an amazing industrial nightmare.
09/12/08
Top CriticDavid Lynch’s 1977 feature debut Eraserhead is one of those rare films that really deserves its cult status – a nightmarish, heavily symbolic story set in a postapocalyptic future.
09/12/08
Top Critic...unwrap this baby and you will discover a whole universe of untold depths and hidden textures in which to become trapped, lost or sublimely elevated. Lynch's debut feature is freakish perfection.
09/03/08
Top CriticLynch's remarkable first feature is a true original.
01/26/06
Top CriticInsanely inventive and evocative.
06/12/04
Compared to the rest of Lynch's work this is a crude assemblage of ideas that would be used to far greater effect in later movies.
04/17/01
Top CriticThis is a classic, no matter how comfortable it is to watch.
01/01/00
Top CriticTime drips like old paint in Lynch's surreal experiment, that revels in all things upsetting, disorienting, dark, and mysterious.
04/12/09
Disturbing, repulsive, hilarious, frightening, sensitive and challenging.
09/25/07
The mind boggles to learn that Lynch labored on this pic for five years.
09/25/07
Top CriticSome of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.
09/25/07
Lynch's films exist independent of space and time, and only after twisting and turning through their labyrinthine visual corridors can we begin to piece together how they came to be in the first place.
07/03/07
Lynch, as he does with all his films, refuses to explain anything, although he does say that he has yet to read an interpretation that matches his.
01/17/07
What a masterpiece of texture, a feat of artisanal attention, an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze.
01/17/07
Whether there is more here than meets the horrified eye, is debatable, but 'Eraserhead' leaves no viewer cold.
01/08/07
Nothing more than a pretentious, incoherent and boring exercise in self-indulgent weirdness.
09/02/06
The discomfort we feel with the film indicates that the truths contained in Eraserhead, whatever they may be, are as surely true as they are unexamined.
06/28/06
A stream of subconsciousness work of art, Eraserhead is Lynch's most surreal film. Packed with grotesque physical deformity and quest for spiritual purity, the film flaunts eerie sound and brilliant imagery.
04/27/06
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