Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
Peter Weller | ... | Bill Lee | |
Judy Davis | ... | Joan Frost / Joan Lee | |
Ian Holm | ... | Tom Frost | |
Julian Sands | ... | Yves Cloquet | |
Roy Scheider | ... | Dr. Benway | |
Monique Mercure | ... | Fadela | |
Nicholas Campbell | ... | Hank | |
Michael Zelniker | ... | Martin | |
Robert A. Silverman | ... | Hans | |
Joseph Scoren | ... | Kiki (as Joseph Scorsiani) | |
Peter Boretski | ... | Creature Voices / Exterminator #2 | |
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Yuval Daniel | ... | Hafid |
John Friesen | ... | Hauser | |
Sean McCann | ... | O'Brien | |
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Howard Jerome | ... | A.J. Cohen |
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 transforms into a cockroach and who becomes involved in a mysterious plot in North African port called Interzone. Wonderfully bizarre, not unlike Burrough's books. Written by Keith Loh <loh@sfu.ca>
Movies in the last years have become more uniform, more streamlined, particularly in the US. As a result, the film market is full of sleek, entertaining movies that the whole world goes to see, but these movies have nothing but harmless baby teeth. Fortunately, people like Lynch or Cronenberg still do movies that may be considered defective by most people, but that bite into the flesh with pointy canines. The Naked Lunch has very sharp teeth indeed. It's supposed to be an adaptation from a William Burrough's book, which doesn't make sense anyway. It starts as the story of a failed writer whose wife becomes addicted to an insecticide powder... It goes downhill after this relatively sane and normal beginning. It's a ride, a drug-induced nightmare full of horribly funny visions (the sort of visions that artists used centuries ago to represent hell). Anuses talk. Aliens sip alcohol in bars. People get impaled. Typewriters turn into bugs. Liquids ooze. You may say it's flawed, or disgusting, or ridiculous, or boring. I saw it with someone who absolutely hated it. But the fact that this person still keeps talking about it 8 years after seeing it says a lot about the Naked Lunch, at a time when we tend to forget blockbusters a few hours after watching them. The Naked Lunch is here - in your mind - to stay.