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Eraserhead (1976)
Runtime: 90 mins
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 sensitive young man as he struggles to cope with impending parenthood. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance)... 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 sensitive young man as he struggles to cope with impending parenthood. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) lives in a hopeless industrial landscape, lusting after the beautiful woman who lives in the apartment across the hall. After his girlfriend, Mary (Charlotte Stewart), informs him of her pregnancy, he is forced to eat dinner with her extremely odd family. The baby is eventually born, only it isn't a human baby at all; it's a deformed creature that resembles a lizard. The baby won't stop crying, a horrifyingly piercing wail that drives Mary insane. Left alone with the baby, Henry is serenaded by a woman who lives inside his radiator, and soon he decides to murder his baby in order to stop the nightmare once and for all. Five years in the making, ERASERHEAD contains all of the trademark attributes of a Lynch film--haunting visuals, an ethereal score, unsettling sound design, and, most notably, a black sense of humor--creating a world onscreen that is exhilarating, terrifying, and unique. [More]
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Starring: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Joseph Allen, Allen Joseph
Screenwriter: David Lynch
Producer: David Lynch
Composer: David Lynch, Fats Waller, Peter Ivers
DVD Info
Release:
Oct 1, 2006
DVD Features:
- Note: This release has been cleaned and digitally remastered from its original release.
- Region 1
- Keep Case - Amaray
- Widescreen - 16:9
- Single Side - Dual Layer
Audio:
- Dolby Digital 2.0 - English
Additional Release Material:
- Featurette
- Trailers
Reviews
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.
Disturbing, repulsive, hilarious, frightening, sensitive and challenging.
The mind boggles to learn that Lynch labored on this pic for five years.
Some 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.
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.
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.
What a masterpiece of texture, a feat of artisanal attention, an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze.
Whether there is more here than meets the horrified eye, is debatable, but 'Eraserhead' leaves no viewer cold.
Nothing more than a pretentious, incoherent and boring exercise in self-indulgent weirdness.
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.
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.
Eraserhead is a work of rare genius and real bravery; it’s a comic nightmare we all have at once and whose meanings lay just out of reach.
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