Naked Lunch Reviews and Ratings


  • lukrezia
    November 28, 2009
    lukrezia
    Interesting... but too bizarre for my taste.
  • flixsterman
    November 14, 2009
    flixsterman
    Picture a film noir Eraserhead populated with drug addicted homosexual entomologists. Bizarre yet thoroughly engrossing.
  • Hellshocked
    October 27, 2009
    Hellshocked
    I have not read "Naked Lunch" but I know enough about it to feel confident in saying that David Cronenberg, one of my favorite directors, was not the right man to adapt it. Despite an intriguing premise, fantastic acting, a great score and an uncompromising approach it is an unde...( read more)rwhelming experience, a brave and often effective but ultimately failed experiment.

    There is a mortifying tendency to disparrage unconventional cinema as "fucked up", and to lump all "fucked up" films together in the same group, as if there is no appreciable difference between the films of Richard Kelly, Kenneth Anger and Alejandro Jodorowsky. As a bankable "fucked up" director, then, Cronenberg was the natural choice for a "fucked up" undertaking such as this. What prophets and pundits failed to realize is that the very tendencies and artistic flourishes that make his films "fucked up" would doom this marriage, perfect only in the most supercicial of levels, from the start.

    Croneberg's entire body of work is based around the concept of body horror. His cold, clinical approach reveals a man who is terrified of the unpredictability of the flesh: it grows, decays, oozes, seeps, transforms, mutates and evolves without rhyme or reason. His films seem to argue that we are intellectual beings trapped in impractical, fleshly bodies over which we have increasingly less control and which will eventually revolt against us in the ultimate of betrayals: death. He approaches art much like a scientist would: he is observant and nonjudgemental. It is this very quality, along with the sharp, clinical feel that his films have as consequence, that makes them so frightening.

    "Naked Lunch" is a film that takes place entirely in the mind. Our lead, an author experiencing writer's block, wanders through the "Interzone", a nest of spies, femme fatales and very bad men somewhere in the middle east. It becomes clear as the film goes on that he has brought himself to this (mental) state in order to come to terms with his own guilt at having accidentally killed his wife, his anger at her unfaithfulness, his crippling yet satisfying addictions and his latent homosexuality. This is material that cries to be set loose, to run wild, to move of its own volition into what crevices it finds. Cronenberg, however, is both unwilling and unable. He anchors it down to a classic structure and reduces the "Interzone" to a drunken and drug addled delusion. As an artist he must have logic, rhyme must follow reason and in this particular case where neither is called for his typically brilliant approach winds up gutting the film, robbing it of its potential beauty and power.

    It is not surprising that the strongest set pieces in the film involve the flesh and body transformation. It is somewhat more surprising to find that Cronenberg's dispassionate manner works extremely well with the more noirish aspects that characterize the film's earlier sequences. Peter Weller, best known as Robocop, delivers a strong and complex performance. As detatched as Cronenberg is to the material our lead is to what is happening to his own body, and even his mind, often taking the role of passive observer through his own trials and tribulations. The supporting actors do the best they can under the circumstances, often being very effective, but the film's insistence on tying itself down takes many oppostunities away from them.
  • BillyRevenge
    October 24, 2009
    BillyRevenge
    Definitely one of my top Cronenberg favourites! Absolutely brilliant! So freaky and funny and scary and beautiful! One of Cronenberg's best!
  • jackgbowman
    October 21, 2009
    jackgbowman
    masterpiece, much better than the book.
  • RiderOfTheStorms
    October 15, 2009
    RiderOfTheStorms
    Really fucked up and trippy. fun 2 watch but in truth i jus didnt understand the point of it.
  • SirPant
    September 22, 2009
    SirPant
    They said the book could never be filmed but Cronenberg proved otherwise. This is a brilliant surreal nightmare, not quite like the book but just as good!
  • ElCochran90
    September 18, 2009
    ElCochran90
    Cronenberg's twisted and depressing masterpiece; very surreal and unusual, but brilliant.

    82/100
  • southernhoney69
    August 29, 2009
    southernhoney69
    will keep your mind and imagination wondering!
  • samanthaseaotter
    August 11, 2009
    samanthaseaotter
    Weird in the extreme but what can you expect from Burroughs? Excellent cast. Worth watching, even if very little of it really make sense.
  • salevr86
    August 1, 2009
    salevr86
    I know it's a classic, but I don't like it. At all. It was dull.
  • latinorick71
    July 31, 2009
    latinorick71
    this movie proves the Cronenberg point hands down. one of his best.
  • lackovicmich
    July 27, 2009
    lackovicmich
    hallucinative festival
  • LYNNWOODS04
    July 26, 2009
    LYNNWOODS04
    This movie is weird and not in a good way..
  • gerard19841
    July 3, 2009
    gerard19841
    es una lástima que nadie se atreva a rodar más acerca de Burroughs. la banda sonora tiene ese toque free jazz que se compagina con cada cita del libro.
  • glois1610
    June 30, 2009
    glois1610
    cucarachas en el poster??? ni hablar
  • Phonex
    June 24, 2009
    Phonex
    a New York bug exterminator who finds that his bug powder is going missing and eventually traces it back to the fact that his wife is shooting up on it. He decides to experiment also, and somewhere along the line a typewriter turns into a giant beetle and tells him to go to `Inte...( read more)rzone' to escape the enemy and write regular reports. Most of the film shows Lee's fight for survival in the seedy, exotic Interzone (or junkyland, as it has been called).

    The single most telling scene of the film is one in which Lee is seen lying in a pile of dirt, crying and hiding. He tells his friends he must get to Interzone and holds up his plane tickets, but all his friends see is a vial of bug powder dust. The whole film is a document of Lee's narcotic-fuelled fantasy and the reports he writes (to whom is never revealed, or indeed relevant) form the pages of `The Naked Lunch'.
  • Elsimondark
    June 22, 2009
    Elsimondark
    Me pareció pesada. Hay algo en la película que me parece que no funciona. No termina de arrancar, aún depués del asesinato de la pareja del protagonista.
  • duygulp
    June 20, 2009
    duygulp
    Naked Lunch...It is a very bizarre film,i accept,i bought the book after i watched it and couldn't possibly understand a word but the film is quite attractive,disturbing and complicated,like the other Cronenberg films and almost none of the Cronenberg films can be my favorite(exc...( read more)ept 'The Brood' and 'Dead Zone',and they're not typical so)but i can't help myself to watch and explore his films.It's always a mixture of subconscious elements,desires,biologic experiments....sometimes just with symbols and instruments.Hard to explain.I'm okay with the last two,because i think you can't do it all the time...He made good examples so far and as a matter of fact the last two were not so regular as well.
  • exureimundo
    June 16, 2009
    exureimundo
    I liked this a lot more when I first saw it, but after watching it again recently, I was not as impressed. Still, every Burroughs reader should see it at least once, and it is MUCH much better than that movie where Kiefer Sutherland plays our Grand Iconoclast. So many people have...( read more) said (almost verbatim): "I liked it, but it was not a faithful adaptation of the book... even Cronenberg admitted that it would be impossible to do it accurately". Where the hell do people read these things? Because it seems like they didn't read the book, or see the movie at that, or that they are not even thinking about it but repeating something some one heard some one else say! It was NOT an adaptation of the book, but a surrealistic account of how Burroughs came to write "Naked Lunch", one in which Cronenberg took every artistic liberty possible. If any thing, it was an adaptation of the introduction. Kind of like writing/directing a biopic when you're on lots of drugs! Bug powder and Mugwump jizz!!
  • R0L0D3X
    June 16, 2009
    R0L0D3X
    My Thoughts
    Superb adaptation!


    Peter Weller: Bill Lee


    Plot
    Exterminator Bill Lee finds himself following his wife into an addiction to the bug powder he uses. After accidentally killing her, he descends into a hallucinatory existence in which he i...( read more)magines himself a secret agent answering to a series of bizarre creatures. He channels his energies into writing "reports" on his delusional mission, while trying to break his addiction. The story loosely reflects events in the life of author Burroughs as he wrote the novel.
  • carlyw66
    June 7, 2009
    carlyw66
    this movie is frickin' weird!!!
  • Nenebelle
    June 5, 2009
    Nenebelle
    Recommended by xXxXHorrorFanxXxX.
  • xXxXHorrorFanxXxX
    June 4, 2009
    xXxXHorrorFanxXxX
    Not an adaptation of beat writer William S. Burrough's novel but a mix of biography and an interpretation of his drug- induced writing processes combined with elements of his work in this paranoid fantasy about Bill Lee, a writer who accidentally shoots his wife, whose typewriter...( read more) transforms into a cockroach and who becomes involved in a mysterious plot in an Islamic port called Interzone. Wonderfully bizarre, not unlike Burrough's books

    Bill Lee: Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. This asshole talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called The Better Ole that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, "Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?" "Nah I had to go relieve myself." After a while the asshole started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his asshole would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and start eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him, "It is you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat AND shit." After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpoles tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous - except for the EYES you dig. Thats one thing the asshole COULDN'T do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldnt give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes WENT OUT, and there was no more feeling in them than a crabs eyes on the end of a stalk.

    Yves Cloquet: I've seen you around, but I had no idea you were queer.
    Bill Lee: Queer?
    Yves Cloquet: [leers] I saw you arrive with those three Interzone boys. What an entrance. You all looked very... familiar with each other.
    Bill Lee: [gulps] Queer. A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain - I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion. I would've destroyed myself. And a wise old queen - Bobo, we called her - taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see. Poor Bobo came to a sticky end - he was riding in the Duke Devanche's Hispano Suissa when his falling hemorrhoids blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe skin upholstry. Even the eyes and the brain went with a horrible "shlupping" sound. The Duke says he would carry that ghastly "shlup" with him to his mausoleum.

    Doctor Benway: We get a lot of you folks in the extermination business. You better tell this friend of yours to get off the bug powder, it'll kill him.
    Bill Lee: How do I get him to kick?
    Doctor Benway: Kick?
    Bill Lee: How do I get him off it?

    Doctor Benway: You'll see how elegantly this works. The black will disappear completely. There'll be no smell, no discoloration. It's like an agent, an agent who's come to believe his own cover story. But who's in there, hiding, in a larval state. Just waiting for a time to hatch out.

    Creature Voices: Say, Bill. Would you rub some of this powder on my lips?

    Creature Voices: Now, repeat after me: "Homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had."

    Bill Lee: Go see the fucking parrots, Kiki.

    Hans: Mr. Lee is curious about the Frost couple. He would like to meet them.
    Kiki: I think the woman would have sex with you, Mr. Lee. The man, he only likes Interzone boys.
    Bill Lee: I don't want to fuck 'em, I just want to talk to 'em.
    Hans: You know how Americans are, Kiki. They all love to travel, and then they only want to meet other Americans and talk about how hard it is to get a decent hamburger.
  • Liloh
    April 29, 2009
    Liloh
    I ll inject myself something if I ever go watch this Movie. zzz.
  • 366weirdmovies
    April 18, 2009
    366weirdmovies
    An exterminator gets hooked on bug powder and flees the law into the mysterious, Casablanca-like "Interzone," while writing a novel and receiving instructions from his typewriter. Loose adaptation of William S. Burroughs surrealistic, stream-of-consciousness novel about drug abu...( read more)se by David Cronenberg is incomprehensible, of course, but worth seeing to see the large variety of scary breathing bug-typewriters who haunt the writers of Interzone.
  • Germantangos
    April 8, 2009
    Germantangos
    Robocop loses his mind. Peter Weller goes on a long strange trip. Based on the book by William Burroughs!
  • ahhh1989
    March 26, 2009
    ahhh1989
    My second favorite Cronenberg film. Very exciting and unpleasant, as it should be. One of the most interesting films about writing you are likely going to see.
  • korndurst007
    February 22, 2009
    korndurst007
    cronenberg is awsome, how did he do it? very interesting movie
  • bigmikevt
    February 17, 2009
    bigmikevt
    Loosely based on William Burroughs' life and writing, revolves around Bill travelling to Interzone, to kick a heroin habit. Warning : Talking Typewriters and homoeroticism, for those can handle neither.
  • alang95123
    February 10, 2009
    alang95123
    one cool freakin movie!
  • ifeels1ck
    January 29, 2009
    ifeels1ck
    A fearless attempt at adapting one of the most bizarre novels of the 60s.
  • lignedechance
    January 17, 2009
    lignedechance
    Both a masterpiece and a gigantic let-down. This should get 5 stars because of the scope of this adaptation and how visually interesting it is. But the undercurrent - heck, overcurrent - of homophobia in this film is offputting and disappointing, especially compared to Burrough...( read more)s' work. I've debated for a while how to interpret Cronenberg's portrayal of queerness here and the ugliness associated on screen. Cronenberg's approach, especially when it comes to when he employs insect metaphors, is wildly inconsistent. The associations of queerness with horror and insectivorous consumption, the unwillingness to portray it in any other light - these are unfortunate choices that I don't think are justified by the source material.
  • willerror1
    January 14, 2009
    willerror1
    I hadn't seen this in years until I picked up the stellar 2-disc DVD. Glad to say it still holds up, I think. David Cronenberg's adaptation of William Burroughs' 1959 Beat "novel" is a strange and unique movie, thought by many to be an interesting failure, but more likely succes...( read more)sful in a way we can't quite grasp--yet. Stellar performances from Peter Weller, Judy Davis (in a dual role as doomed muse), Ian Holm, Julian Sands and Roy Scheider. Writing as addiction, imagination as curse, drugs as freedom to create, fear of identity--how much does the subconscious mind rule all our lives? Lots of goopy FX but with a bone-dry sense of humor. Terrific score from Howard Shore and saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Watch on a double bill with the Coen Bros' BARTON FINK and exterminate all rational thought.
  • amechanicaldisaster
    January 7, 2009
    amechanicaldisaster
    Just kind of...bizarre, really. I dunno.
  • frankjr19
    January 6, 2009
    frankjr19
    Moi et le surréalisme, nous nous marrierons. Non, peut-être pas à ce point là, mais je n'arrive pas à concevoir la raison de mon attraction envers le surréalisme tandis que le postmodernisme me répugne et m'épuise. Devrais-je plutôt me tourner vers l'absurde et le burlesque? Le f...( read more)ait est que Naked Lunch m'a vraiment fasciné du début jusqu'à la fin, et ce, peu importe ce qu'en dise les critiques. Cronenberg réalise un film qui s'inscrit dans la ligne sacrée des réalisations surréalistes et fait presque même rougir par là le Pape Breton.

    Ce qui est merveilleux, c'est que, non seulement le spectateur retient ce qu'il veut bien retenir du film, mais que, contrairement au pur surréalisme, chaque élément a un lien, il est sous-entendu, sous-relié par une conspiration qui guette la monotonie. Par sa machine à écrire, Bill Lee exprime son inconscient. Par Cronenberg, nous exprimons aussi le nôtre.

    Ce film, n'eût été du surréalisme, en serait un kafkaïen.
  • alienun711
    December 26, 2008
    alienun711
    peter weller
    judy davis
    roy scheider
  • conleyisn
    December 16, 2008
    conleyisn
    Rub some of that powder on my lips, Will.
  • oldkentuckyshark
    December 8, 2008
    oldkentuckyshark
    This movie would have been better had they not called it Naked Lunch. It works well as an imaginary biography of Burroughs, but not as an adaptation of the book.
  • richardksbaer
    November 23, 2008
    richardksbaer
    I didn't know what was happening, but I couldn't pull myself away.
  • jeffherbert
    November 17, 2008
    jeffherbert
    What can be said that hasn't been said before?? rare that a film has the effect of making you feel that you've been on the piss for the weekend after watching it. Willam Burroughs - repeat - William Burroughs - does this not say it all???
  • TMaks
    November 15, 2008
    TMaks
    Probably one of the worst movies I've seen in my life!! Seriously, it's awful and meaningless, don't watch it!
  • engrymfilm
    October 20, 2008
    engrymfilm
    Alternate tagline: "What's for lunch? Naked lunch!"
  • ndgagne1
    October 12, 2008
    ndgagne1
    Naked Lunch is a really strange movie. Not surprising, considering that most did not believe that it was possible to transport the book onto the screen. The plot to this one was actually pretty intriguing and I really liked the way that Cronenberg makes the audience question whic...( read more)h parts (if any) are reality and which are fantasy. There's a great mix between the two. The score, while quite subtle, was actually pretty affective as well and complimented all of the weird visuals nicely. The negative aspect of this film is the somewhat pedestrian acting performances, which may or may not have been deliberate, but at times was unpleasant. Also, it was very difficult to make sense of. No surprise there. I have a feeling that, if you've read the book then this would be very enjoyable. On the other hand, if you don't like movies that can be confusing to watch or that don't wear their purpose on their sleeve then this one won't be for you. For everyone in between, it's worth checking out.
  • Kavu
    October 9, 2008
    Kavu
    It's weird as hell but that's why I like it. Cronenberg does an excellent job in containing the weirdness. What an ending!

Summary

Naked Lunch Summary