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Eraserhead (1976)
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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.
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Horror/Suspense
US Box Office: $0
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... 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]
Starring: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Joseph Allen
Starring: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Joseph Allen, Judith Roberts, Allen Joseph, Jennifer Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Screenwriter: David Lynch
Producer: David Lynch
Composer: David Lynch, Fats Waller, Peter Ivers
Reviews for Eraserhead
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.
...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.
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.
Time drips like old paint in Lynch's surreal experiment, that revels in all things upsetting, disorienting, dark, and mysterious.
May be the greatest debut by an American director after Citizen Kane.
David Lynch has "cleaned up" his freaky feature debut, but don't worry - it's still an amazing industrial nightmare.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing more than a pretentious, incoherent and boring exercise in self-indulgent weirdness.
It represented a monumental shift in how movies are seen and digested -- one that raised the level of aptitude and film literacy throughout the world.
Seen today, Eraserhead may make no more sense than it did 30 years ago, but its casually sinister air can now be seen as so much a part of Lynch's mature work.
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