Naked Lunch (1991)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.
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But from the credit sequence evoking The Man With the Golden Arm, through the tenement of boho squalor, the Ornette Coleman sax doodling, the sidekicks modeled on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and the junkie slapstick (fingers that can't find the cigarette in one's mouth), to the pair of beefy narcs who bring the hero downtown, you have to wonder whose '50s are these?
Discounting such vintage Cronenberg body-horrors as Rabid or The Brood, the closest Naked Lunch came to the screen was in Howard Brookner's 1983 documentary Burroughs, which included a brief dramatization of the book's lavatory operation with Burroughs himself as Doctor Benway, braying about the time he performed an appendectomy with "a rusty sardine can" while massaging the patient's heart with a toilet plunger.
Written and directed by the bodily-horror fetishist David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers), who has freely adapted William S. Burroughs' famously subversive 1959 collage novel a scabrous fantasia of murder, technological doom, and violent homosexual release in the face of bureaucratic ''control'' Naked Lunch may be the strangest concoction ever released by a major studio, yet it isn't at all hard to watch.
Adapted by David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of, among others, "Dead Ringers" and "The Fly," the film isn't a literal transcription of the novel at all; it's more a fictional essay on Burroughs and the anxious birth of the novel.
This is the guy, after all, who made "Scanners," "The Fly" and "Dead Ringers."
Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs' classic 1959 novel is adapted to the screen by the peerless cult horror story director David Cronenberg ("The Fly"/"Dead Ringers"), who chooses to bypass the rampant homosexuality in the book and concentrate in a novel way on the hallucinatory experiences of the writer living among those in an expatriate artistic community of Tangier.
Well, if there is anyone who can do it, it has to be Canadian director David ( The Fly , Videodrome , Dead Ringers) Cronenberg who is obsessed with the bizarre and grotesque.
Discounting such vintage Cronenberg body-horrors as Rabid or The Brood, the closest Naked Lunch came to the screen was in Howard Brookner's 1983 documentary Burroughs, which included a brief dramatization of the book's lavatory operation with Burroughs himself as Doctor Benway, braying about the time he performed an appendectomy with "a rusty sardine can" while massaging the patient's heart with a toilet plunger.
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Written and directed by the bodily-horror fetishist David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers), who has freely adapted William S. Burroughs' famously subversive 1959 collage novel a scabrous fantasia of murder, technological doom, and violent homosexual release in the face of bureaucratic ''control'' Naked Lunch may be the strangest concoction ever released by a major studio, yet it isn't at all hard to watch.
In addition, he provides plenty of grotesque special effects that fans of The Fly will relish.
Adapted by David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of, among others, "Dead Ringers" and "The Fly," the film isn't a literal transcription of the novel at all; it's more a fictional essay on Burroughs and the anxious birth of the novel.
This is the guy, after all, who made "Scanners," "The Fly" and "Dead Ringers."
Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs' classic 1959 novel is adapted to the screen by the peerless cult horror story director David Cronenberg ("The Fly"/"Dead Ringers"), who chooses to bypass the rampant homosexuality in the book and concentrate in a novel way on the hallucinatory experiences of the writer living among those in an expatriate artistic community of Tangier.
Ranking alongside the likes of " The Fly " and " Videodrome ," " Naked Lunch " carefully plucks from the science fiction, drama, and fantasy genres while sending the viewer on one of the most peculiar and hallucinogenic film experiences they've ever had.