Eraserhead (1976)
Tomatometer
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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... [More]
Starring: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Joseph Allen
Director: David Lynch
Reviews for Eraserhead
| Tomatometer | Critic | Review | Category |
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 A+ |
Time drips like old paint in Lynch's surreal experiment, that revels in all things upsetting, disorienting, dark, and mysterious. Full Review |
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4/5 |
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. Full Review |
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5/5 |
David Lynch has "cleaned up" his freaky feature debut, but don't worry - it's still an amazing industrial nightmare. Full Review |
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4/5 |
David 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. Full Review |
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...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. Full Review |
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4/4 |
Disturbing, repulsive, hilarious, frightening, sensitive and challenging. Full Review |
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The mind boggles to learn that Lynch labored on this pic for five years. Full Review |
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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. Full Review |
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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. Full Review |
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4/5 |
No review available.
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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. Full Review |
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What a masterpiece of texture, a feat of artisanal attention, an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze. Full Review |
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Whether there is more here than meets the horrified eye, is debatable, but 'Eraserhead' leaves no viewer cold. Full Review |
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1/10 |
Nothing more than a pretentious, incoherent and boring exercise in self-indulgent weirdness.
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4/4 |
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. Full Review |
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5/5 |
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. Full Review |
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5/5 |
David Lynch's first feature and, arguably, his best. Full Review |
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5/6 |
Lynch's remarkable first feature is a true original. Full Review |
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5/5 |
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. Full Review |
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If you can't rejoice in David Lynch, what is there to be happy about? Full Review |
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