After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally kills his wife, and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in a port town in North Africa.
When he acquires a different kind of show for his station, a sleazy cable-TV programmer begins to see his life and the future of media spin out of control in a terrifying new reality.
After getting into a serious car accident, a TV director discovers an underground sub-culture of scarred, omnisexual car-crash victims who use car accidents and the raw sexual energy they produce to try to rejuvenate his sex life with his wife.
A game designer on the run from assassins must play her latest virtual reality creation with a marketing trainee to determine if the game has been damaged.
A mentally disturbed man takes residence in a halfway house. His mind gradually slips back into the realm created by his illness, where he replays a key part of his childhood.
Director:
David Cronenberg
Stars:
Ralph Fiennes,
Miranda Richardson,
Gabriel Byrne
The residents of a suburban high-rise apartment building are being infected by a strain of parasites that turn them into mindless, sex-crazed fiends out to infect others by the slightest sexual contact.
A young woman develops a taste for human blood after undergoing experimental plastic surgery, and her victims turn into rabid, blood-thirsty zombies who proceed to infect others, which turns into a city-wide epidemic.
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>
A desert was re-created on a Toronto soundstage by pouring seven hundred tons of sand onto the floor of a former munitions factory. See more »
Goofs
The glass shot off Judy Davis' head changes to a plastic glass. First instance as the glass is falling off her head after the shot and then at end of film it is a plastic glass Ms Davis balances on her head. It remains plastic until it falls to floor and changes back into glass. See more »
This film of 'Naked Lunch' is the first of Cronenberg's Trilogy
of filming three of the most challenging literary works of the
20th Century, and arguably the most difficult... as anyone who's
read Burroughs' 1959 novel can attest, in conventional terms it
is a book without a cohesive plot or even structure, largely
assembled from the paranoid rambling letters of the world's most
notorious drug addict. Cronenberg's approach to the material is
ingenious in that he attempts to fictionalize the circumstances
under which the book was written rather than trying to weave a
storyline from the mass of twisted plot threads which comprise
the text. The cast is impeccable, particularly Peter Weller and Judy Davis
as the leads, Ian holm as a psuedo-Paul Bowles, and Cronenberg
regulars Robert A. Silverman as Hans and Nicholas Campbell as
Kerouac-ish Hank. Julian Sands and Roy Scheider don't quite
infuse their roles with the ridiculousness of their counterparts
from the novel, but their cameos are brief and don't detract
from the overall effect. The overall effect being a hypnotic, schizophrenic blend of
biography and folklore, equal parts Cronenberg and Burroughs, a
self-tortured portrait of the creative process. To the
director's credit, he relies on the script (his own) and the
performances over visual trickery or stock travelogue scenery to
set the mood and propel the action. The astonishing soundtrack,
by the superb Howard Shore, underscores the drug-filled malaise
of this Tangerine dream perfectly... it lacks any musical sense
of time and therefore hangs over the proceedings like a
mysterious haze. Haunting, powerful cinema... but most
definitely not for everyone. Wise up the marks before laying
this on them.