Liz: ?????? out of 5 stars

This movie was quite an experience for me. It was my first surreal movie, and I’m really not quite sure that I understood it or enjoyed it? It definitely intrigued me though and I stayed to watch the whole thing.

Quick summary: Eraserhead, directed by David Lynch and starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Judith Anna Roberts, Laurel Near, and Jack Fisk is a film about a man who is left to take care of a deformed baby that came of a sexual encounter with his girlfriend. He experiences really strange and grotesque hallucinations/ dreams throughout the film. That’s the best I can do folks.

The thing I liked best about this movie was the “soundtrack.” The sound effects or sometimes lack of, contributed greatly to that sense of true discomfort and horror that characterizes this movie for me, from start to finish. Silence or that low-level background noise was super eery for me, as well as the sudden spurts of loud noise or music.

I also liked Jack Nance’s performance as Henry. First of all, he kind of walked like how I think silent movie actors appeared — really fidgety. (this is more of just a random thought that I wanted to put out there). Also, he barely talked ever in the movie, but his facial expressions and movements were really good to me and I was very thrown off by how he seemed to remain oblivious or unphased by all these terrible odd things happening around him.

I’m certainly at a loss for how I really feel about this movie. I could say that I hated it because it made me uncomfortable and there was an overabundance of creepy to disgusting things on display. I could say that I LOVED it because it’s something that I’ve never ever seen so much of before in a movie and that maybe I was picking up on some true human fears that were just horrifically exaggerated. I could say that I was 50/50 because it was strange and bizarre enough to keep me watching, yet I couldn’t quite place what it was exactly about. I kept scribbling down things that I saw in the movie that could possibly mean something bigger, but I could just be dead wrong about them. In the end, I just decided to go with the experience and not worry about finding hidden meanings.

Eraserhead was super weird for me, but I’m glad I watched it. I will say though that because this movie was FULL of disturbing things, I was almost bored at the end because I came to expect that everything I would see would be more of the same thing. I don’t know, maybe I need to read some deep analysis of this somewhere and rewatch it. I just wanted to get out my thoughts about this, so I apologize if this didn’t really seem like too much of a review.

Final thought: His deformed baby looks like E.T.’s older brother or something. It freaked me out.

I’ll be back tomorrow with my review of Filth.