Babies, Crazies and Ladies in Radi...ators: What is Eraserhead?

Damn. I nearly made that title rhyme, didn't I?

Last night I went to see David Lynch's bizarre 1977 debut feature Eraserhead on the big screen in a new 35mm print at the Astor Theatre. A marvellous experience - "experience" being a very apt word to describe any David Lynch viewing, especially on the big screen - to be sure, and one that left me rather speechless. Having seen it once before on DVD, I couldn't have estimated the power that the film has on a cinema screen. Of particular note are the final 30 minutes or so, during which the strange peculiarities that Lynch had been stirring for an hour finally start to sputter and boil out of control, becoming a deranged fever dream of surreal and even spiritual images.

But what exactly is Eraserhead? That, I couldn't possible answer. Is it a grave look at the consequences of bringing a child into the world? Is it a look at the suffocating and depressing lives of the lower class? Is it merely a look at the gradual mental breakdown of a couple, brought to the brink by the cruelness of life? It could be one, all or none of these things.

It rightly secured it's place amongst the original and the greatest cult films ever made, but if you look carefully there is so much to admire from a pure filmmaking stand point. Firstly, surely Eraserhead ranks as one of the most assured directing debuts of all time. The audience would instantly understand what "a film by David Lynch" is and he has, more or less, continued to give audiences just that for decades since to cheers and chagrin of viewers. And while several aspects of this film have been reworked by Lynch into his other films - the discovery of a body part (Blue Velvet), the art design (Twin Peaks), the peculiar bond of family (The Straight Story), the dread-filled sound design (INLAND EMPIRE), even the fade to white operatic final shot (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, right) - never were they done so authentically and as honestly as here. With his budget of only $10,000 - some of which provided by Sissy Spacek and Jack Fisk! - this is a vision Lynch absolutely had to believe in and while it's not my favourite of his films, it stands up as perhaps his most daring and personal work to date.

In fact, while we're on the subject, while I've always believed Mulholland Drive - my favourite Lynch film - was a "best of David Lynch" type of affair, I'd never really noticed just now much was taken from the 1977 film and supplanted to the 2001 film. The man cranking the levers behind the scenes in Eraserhead could easily be altered as the mysterious homeless man in the alley off Sunset Blvd; the radiator and the blue box are both mystical portals; Laurel Near and Rebekah Del Rio, hello!; the deranged descent into madness of the final scenes; the excruciating meet-the-parents dinner sequences. It doesn't make me think any less of Mulholland Drive mind you, just might make me look at it in a different light upon next viewing. A modern day Eraserhead, perhaps? One without the main character having her brain processed into the little eraser nubs on the ends of pencils, obviously.


Other than Lynch's obvious filmmaking skill, however, there is the performance by Jack Nance. The man who would go on to become a Lynch regular - most famously as Peter Martell in Twin Peaks - gives a performance that somehow manages to emerge clear as day from all that surrounds him. His assortment of confused faces mix perfectly with several moments of inspired, if under-appreciated humour. I particularly love the moment after the chicken has bled on the dinner table and he calmly puts down the carving knife and fork. It's hard to explain, but if you see it I think you'd see what I noticed.

And while Charlotte Stewart (the future Log Lady), Allen Joseph and Jeanne Bates are all macabre and odd as the family X, I want to single out Judith Anna Roberts as the "Beautiful Girl Across the Hall", who I always think looks a bit like Sandra Bernhard. Lynch's camera - cinematographers Herbert Cardwell and Frederick Elmes, presumably two due to the five year filming schedule - frames her gorgeously, constantly emerging and disappearing into pitch black. Those close-ups in the bedroom sequence with Jack Nance are perfection. There's a real old school glamour (to coin a frequently used phrase) and film-noir classiness to the way she is shot, which is surprising giving the rest of the film is not filmed like that at all, instead taking inspiration from the likes of German expressionism.

To say nothing of Laurel Near's "lady in the radiator"... well, even if I haven't the foggiest idea what it means, yet is pure bliss. As has become a regular thing with Lynch, his soundtracks are given just as much prominence as anything else, and while Eraserhead doesn't have much in the way of a traditional score - instead relying more on the omnipresent industrial sound effects and ominous sound design - the moment when Near's heavily made-up, blonde-wigged radiator girl starts to sing a song called "In Heaven", you'd be forgiven for thinking you had in fact been taken there. She's like an older, grotesque Shirley Temple, and it's a rare moment of peaceful clarity in an otherwise terrifying, exhausting and stunning movie. A

Review: Enter the Void

Enter the Void
Dir. Gasper Noé
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: R18+
Running Time: 161mins

Where does a film like Enter the Void stand in 2010?

I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but as I read the fabulous Liminal Vision blog today discuss the history of cult cinema, and today’s sad sorry state, I couldn’t help but think of Gasper Noé’s Enter the Void, which I had just seen mere hours earlier. Right now in Melbourne cinemas (well, actually, just the one – Cinema Nova in Carlton) you have the chance to see both Enter the Void and Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus and as fun as I found the latter, its inclusion in the cinema’s “cult craving” sidebar of late night screenings belies its inception as a film with minimal goals and limited resources. Mega Shark may be “cult” in that it’s a bad movie and people enjoy sitting in a crowd, mocking it to tears, but it doesn’t lay any claim to being an actual piece of cult cinema in the traditional sense.

As I sat in the tiny, yet thankfully plush, cinema – barely 20 seats, I swear – I couldn’t help but think that Noe’s hyperactive, neon-infused, heroine-addicted, batshit insane hooladoowacky movie going experience would be the type of film that audiences would have actually embraced in the cult heyday of the 1970s. There’s a big difference between seeing Enter the Void in a small cinema with comfortable seats and a bottle of water in the drink-holder and attending a sticky-floored cinema and watching it through a haze of marijuana smoke, which is certainly how David Lynch’s Eraserhead, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo - famed cult classics, all of them – were viewed in their time.


It’s like what audiences did with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, paying their $2 admission fee (or however much it was) to get high and trip out on acid right there in the cinema. Somehow I imagine it’s just not the same in 2010. Today, drug tripping university students are far more likely to download Enter the Void and watch it on the new flatscreen TV that their parents just purchased for them. It’s enough to make me pine for an era I wasn’t even alive for.

I started thinking of all this because, well, there really isn’t much to think about in Gasper Noé’s first film since the shocking Irreversible in 2001. Where that film had a powerful and complex core behind its outer sheen of abhorrent violence, one that lingered long after initial viewing, Enter the Void is an exasperating two and a half hour ponderous excursion through Noé’s over-indulgent, untamed imagination. And a rather unmoving one at that (even as shock cinema I wasn’t particularly shocked.) Why end your film after an hour and a half when you’ve run out of things to say when you can keep going for another hour? It’s art, silly. I may not have seen anything like this before in my life, but I don't think I wanted to see two and a half hours of whatever it actually was. Much like Gulliver’s Travels last week, I suspect one must be on the sort of hardcore drugs that Noé’s lead character is on in order to get through it with any sense of what he was trying to achieve.

The thing is that I believe Noé has something in here worth saying, it’s just hidden far, far beneath the five (or was it ten?) minute visual effect hallucination sequences, frequent rollercoaster orbits over the Tokyo skyline, screeching conversations between uninteresting characters and ever-looping flashbacks filmed from camera angles that give the impression Noé and cinematographer Benoît Debie thought they were being awfully inventive when really they just shoved the camera on a ceiling fan and flipped the dial. Noé is unafraid to show whatever he wants and yet surprisingly in a film filled with uncomfortable scenes of drug use and a 20-minute long sequence in a sex hotel (in which glowing visual effects are emitted out of male and female genitals, naturally) it is the abrupt violence (a shot gun, a car accident) that has the most impact. Drug addicts don’t really surprise me, I guess. Is that flippant? Perhaps, but when even I’m bored by a visual effects inspired neon driven version of Tokyo I know there’s a problem.


The film is a frightful bore and yet is boring whilst encompassing everything that can be fascinating about cinema. I just can’t help but feel this must be what it’s like to be on a drug trip that lasts as long as a hiccup. Enter the Void is visually audacious, it weaves a stunning tapestry of sounds and colour, it’s structurally intriguing and these characters should be rich in pathos (actors like Paz de la Huerta and Olly Alexander put a stop to that), but the final product is empty. There are individual moments of wonder including one of the most flabbergasting, bravura, balls-to-the-wall opening credits sequences that you’re ever likely to see, but it’s all merely a temporary high. The initial effect is eye-opening, but then it’s all downhill and I just wished Noé would inject whatever energy he used for that LFO-soundtracked credits sequence into the rest of the film. Noé is like a drug dealer whose product is disappointing. I’ve sampled and now I’d like my money back. C-


One last think I feel I should mention and that’s the oft poorly used first person view. Enter the Void uses this for its opening act and while he certainly gets some good shots out of it, I always find the tactic an annoying one since nothing can replicate one’s actual field of vision. Especially as we’re watching it on a cinema screen with our own peripheral vision. Am I the only one who thinks this method of looking natural results in the exact opposite and looks incredibly fake?

The Full Blossom of the Evening: Some Thoughts on Twin Peaks

Please note that although this blog entry discusses a lot about Twin Peaks there are no actual plot spoilers if you haven't seen the series and wish to do so. Feel free to keep reading.


I noticed today that David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me has made its way to Blu-Ray. That's great news in one respect for fans of the series and the film, but it's disappointing to note that this release still doesn't include the two hours of deleted scenes that David Lynch excised from the finished product. I know the history of why we've never seen them - legal wranglings between the European production company and New Line Cinema - but it's still a damn shame!

Nevertheless, seeing the Blu-Ray release reminded me that I had never spoken about "Laurathon", an event held in November at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) here in Melbourne. I love living in Melbourne, have I mentioned that before? Yeah, I do, because of events like this! 9 and a half hours of Twin Peaks goodness on the big screen in a room lined with red curtains and a seemingly endless supply of donuts at our disposal. It began with the pilot episode, which is - in my humble opinion - the greatest episode of television ever crafted. So, really, not that big of a deal. Alongside that episode they screened episode 7 ("Realization Time"), episode 14 ("Demons" where Laura's killer was reveals), episode 30 ("Beyond Life and Death", the series finale) as well as the movie prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

That pilot... will it ever be topped? Who knows what television has in store for us, but it's just a slice of perfection, that pilot, isn't it? So many memorable moments that are forever branded upon my brain. If I had to choose but just two - my two favourites - I would have to go with Ronette Pulaski's walk across the train tracks since the imagery is so frightening with those "twin peaks" in the background and the tattered dress that'll make you really question where the series is going. Secondly, I'd choose the school sequence towards the beginning, starting with Audrey's smoke in the locker, her flitter of fingers in home room, the screaming girl across the school yard and that eerie tracking shot down the corridor towards Laura's homecoming photo in the displace case. The entire scene really captures that feeling of other-worldliness... I can recognise it as the real world, but there's a quality there that just feels slightly alien. The characters act just slightly off, don't they? Twin Peaks was always the best with it straddled that line delicately. Both are viewable below.


Episode 14 is - here we go again - probably the second greatest episode of television that I can recall. In fact, just the other day I was at my mother's house and turned on the Foxtel and what should be on? Episode 14 of Twin Peaks! Needless to say I rewatched it even though I've seen it many times, including as recently as a month earlier. Such powerful stuff, and yet, in everything that happens in that episode, you know my absolute favourite moment? Favourite of moments above all?


"I want you /
Rockin' back inside my heart"
There's something about that moment that speaks to the innocence and the childhood that these characters (Donna and James) have lost, and that Laura had lost long ago. It's a moment is minute beauty surrounded by so much doom and gloom. Love.It. Plus, the song is pretty great, too!

The final episode? Yeah. I can't even go there.


Of course, the movie is something else entirely, isn't it? Yowza! I'd never seen it on the big screen with a proper sound system, and it's a glorious thing to behold. Admittedly, I am a huge fan of the film - I'd rank it somewhere behind Mulholland Drive as my favourite David Lynch movie - unlike some people, but to see it projected onto the big screen is an experience to treasure. Lynch knows how to work sound and he certainly turns the volume up to 11 here.

The final 30 minutes are, of course, some of the toughest cinema you'll ever see. Fire Walk with Me is rated R18+ for a reason (equivalent to America's NC17 if you'd like). The culmination of two series worth of mystery, intrigue and wonder combined with the film's near-apocalyptic sense of menace and dread, all rolled up into a terrifying package. The sort of horror you don't even find in more traditional horror movies. Scarier, too.

And that ending... wow. As much as I would be intrigued to see where Lynch would go by picking the story up again 25 years later (and it most certainly will remain a rumour, but an interesting one nonetheless with Laura's "you will see me again in 25 years" comment don't you think?), I think the final few minutes of Fire Walk with Me (below) are the perfect coda to the entire Twin Peaks saga. If you watched everything in a through line - pilot episode through to Fire Walk with Me, despite their flip-flop narrative - then I can't imagine a more apt ending. Laura and Dale, the two driving forces of the show, together in the black lodge as Angelo Badalementi's haunting synth score floats overhead, an angel appearing as if by pure virtue of David Lynch's oddity and then.... the laugh. It's just perfect. I know I'm typing similar things a lot in this entry, but it's one of my all time favourite endings.


Speaking of Twin Peaks - obviously - I recently did a piece for Trespass Mag that looked at the fates of the actors and their subsequent careers after the untimely demise - or was it perfectly timed? - of the series. Whilst I was at Laurathon I gave a little bit of a vox pop soundbite to the Boxcutters crew (Australia's best - only? - TV-themed podcast, run by exceptional people I'm glad I know in real life) and you can listen to it here.

Review: Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus
Dir. Ace Hannah
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 85mins

To coin a phrase as sung by Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville (because, since we’re talking about a movie called Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, why not?); I don’t know much, but I know that if you want to see Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus then you should see it with a large crowd made up on cult movie boffins who delight in watching the weird and the appalling projected on big cinema screens surrounded by other bad movie fans. Much like The Room, a Melbourne cult cinema mainstay, this latest entry in Cinema Nova’s Cult Cravings is designed to be viewed with many people, all of whom are hootin’ and hollerin’ and having a good time.

There’s really not much to say on the film, to be perfectly honest. Everything you can possible hope to know about the movie is right there in the title. I could reel off a list of moments that had me in various stages of laught0er – from mild giggles to full on cackles – but to read about the hilarious extras, the dodgy CGI or the tacky scenes of “sexy science” just isn’t as fun as seeing it for yourself as you wave your “Team Shark!” or “Team Octopus!” flags (yes, actual flags) and cheer when your chosen defender gets the upper hand. Or, you can ditch either of them and go for “Team Seagull”, “Team Gun-Toting Security Guard”, “Team Pelican” or any other team you care to create out of the various throwaway establishment shots that director Ace Hannah includes.


Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus doesn’t have the fascinating back-story, instant rewatchability and all-round bizarre eye-popping badness of The Room, nor was it ever aiming for anything within proximity to quality, but what it has in its favour is a gleeful sensibility that is awakened by being watched with a large group of likeminded cinemagoers. I can’t attest to how it plays on DVD in your own home, but there’s something quite comical about settling down in a plush cinema seat after a few beers to watch a movie in which, very literally, a mega shark and a giant octopus battle it out mano-a-mano. To end this review, let’s take some wise words from Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus’ own leading lady, 1980s pop star Debbie Gibson, and note that the future only belongs to the future itself and the future is Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Well, for 85 brief minutes it is, anyway. Z-

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus will screen as a part of Cinema Nova's Cult Craving sessions, here in Melbourne, from Boxing Day!

A Room With a View of Thunder

Last Saturday night I took some friends along to see Tommy Wiseau's "disasterpiece" The Room at Cinema Nova. It was the fourth time I had partaken in the greatest cinematic experience of my life, and it has lost none of its distinctive power. I was watching it with friends, some of whom had never seen it before and who, upon exiting, were just as baffled and amazed as one would expect after tasting the delectable treat that is Wiseau's magical fantasy land of manipulative women, drug peddling manchildren, games of football in tuxedos and cancer-stricken mothers. Oh how we laughed.

Anybody who follows me on Twitter will know that later in the evening I was taken to hospital and I think we can all agree that Lisa had something to do with this. Tommy Wiseau seems to think she's responsible for every misdeed known to mankind - and, as written, it's hard not to agree - so why not this, too?

I bring up The Room, however, because on Monday night I sat down to watch a particularly startling movie entitled A Sound of Thunder. Sometimes it's hard to gauge the hows and whys of particular cult movies, but it surprises me that Peter Hyam's sci-fi monstrosity adaptation of Ray Bradbury's famed short story hasn't developed some sort of underground following. In this day and age of bad movie worship, A Sound of Thunder is as good a candidate as I've come across in quite some time.

While Wiseau's Room cost $6 million dollars - including the funds it took to hire a billboard in downtown Los Angeles(!!!) - A Sound of Thunder cost $80 million and yet looks just as cheap as The Room. It was produced by Franchise Pictures, who went bankrupt during post production, and they should be familiar to all bad movie aficionados as the same company that produced Battlefield Earth, Ballistic: Ecks Vs Sever and the remake of Get Carter. Director Hyams has only made one film since despite some impressive (to some) films on his resume before this monumental debacle.


There are so many things wrong with this movie that it's surely impossible to list them all. How about those prehistoric sequences with embarrassing sets that remind me of a lame-brained CGI version of The Big Dollhouse and featuring dinosaurs that appear to have regressed so far beyond Jurassic Park that it borders on a non-existent Theodore Rex computer game for Commodore 64. Furthermore, the scenes set in this incredibly unflattering incarnation of 2055 feature the worst visual effects I have seen in a modern day film. Yes, they somehow best the abyssal work of Battlefield Earth. For whatever reason, the makers of this movie decided to film everybody against green screens that are subsequently filled with ridiculously flat images of skyscrapers, silly robotic toy cars and extras that look like they wondered in from the set of a cheap, direct-to-DVD remake of Double Indemnity. It looks like the CGI equivalent of rear projection; so completely and utterly fake and yet, unlike the days of rear projection, A Sound of Thunder was not made in the 1950s. Remember that scene in Flying High! where the chariot race appears behind the people in the car? It's like that but instead of a chariot race it's somebody's neighbourhood from The Sims.

It's all just so hilariously disposable and ridiculous. Of course, the worst effect of all is Ben Kingsley's hair. Ben Kingsley's hair and face, actually. Kingsley - who is clearly one of the un-pickiest actors in Hollywood; Daniel Day-Lewis he is not - gives one of those strangely cartoonish performances the he is wont to do, but this time with a fright wig that would give Leland Palmer a run for his money and a complexion that gives the illusion that he uses his salary from pictures such as this, Thunderbirds and The Love Guru (wherein he plays "Guru Tugginmypudha") to finance his holiday home on Mercury.

And what of Ed Burns? He would certainly make a suitably realistic zombie in Ted Mikel's next Astro-Zombies creation. No expensive make-up required there! The rest of the cast are all nameless, faceless nobodies so, at least in that regard, they have nothing on "Silk Shirt Guy" and "Cancer-Riddled Claudette" from The Room, but I haven't even gotten to the best part yet.

GORILLA DINOSAURS!!!!
Yup, apparently, when someone steps on a butterfly back in the cretaceous period, it causes a series of evolutionary "waves" (basically, really bad tsunamis of vegetation) and with it comes a species of dinosaurs that not only didn't become extinct, but somehow evolved into (or from, or maybe they mated? The so-called "science" is never explained in any great detail whatsoever) this sort of weird half breed dinosaurs with baboon faces that make chest-thumping noises like a mountain gorilla, but have the hunting pack mentality of those funny raptor dinosaurs from the canteen sequence of Jurassic Park.

And the weird bat monsters? I don't even know what they were meant to be.

I personally got a kick out of the bizarro science. This company that sends rich fuddy duddies back in time to hunt dinosaurs only goes back to a moment in time when the dinosaur they hunt (the same one each and every time) was going to die anyway (first in a swamp and then because of a volcano). Yet, somehow, somebody stepping off the path and killing a butterfly irrevocably changes history. Would that butterfly not have died in the volcano that sends ash right down towards the time portal, from which these futuristic travellers ventured, in only a few seconds. Could that butterfly flap its wings so fast that it avoided a catastrophic natural disaster before going on to lay eggs that allowed apes to become humans and for ferns to sprout flowers that would eventually allow us to live as we are to 2055 and onwards. And how come each group of backwards travellers do not bump into one another at the same dinosaur hunting ground? Or why these recurring time waves all but send people to the hospital they are so forceful and yet Ed Burns' character appears to sleep through the very first one. Oh, science! Who needs you?!


There really is no wonder why the film sat on the shelf for three years before getting released. It was able to coerce $1.9million from American audiences at the box office, which is a staggering amount really, although upon viewing the trailer there's not much in it that gives the waft of how bad A Sound of Thunder really is. I laughed during it. I laughed a lot. My eyes bugged out of their sockets and I screamed "Oh. My. God." at the television more than once. Watching A Sound of Thunder is akin to watching money get flushed down an ugly, clown toilet and Ben Kingsley is the grand ringmaster.