The April 1997 issue of Cinefantastique (Volume 28, Number 10) features a cover story on the making of Stuart Gordon’s SPACE TRUCKERS. There is extensive coverage of Davdi Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY. The issue includes a look back at the best cinefantastique from 1996, along with horror and sci-fi Oscar picks. Other articles cover David Cronenberg’s CRASH; ANACONDA, MEN IN BLACK.

Contents for the issue are:

• 3 Editorial by Steve Biodrowski
• 4 Release Schedule: The Month’s Genre Films
• 5 Hollywood Gothic: News & Notes on “Contact, “Kissed,” Starship Troopers,” “Mortal Kombat II”; obituaries for Jordan Cronenweth and Jack Nance Continue Reading »

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A Surreal Meditation on Love, Jealousy, Identify, and Reality.

By Frederick C Szebin and Steve Biodrowski

David Lynch. The name is synonymous to film-goers around the world with the cinema of the abstract, the surreal, and the obtuse. The director of ERASERHEAD, DUNE, and BLUE VELVET, offers his first feature since TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME. This latest work, LOST HIGHWAY, is a dual-storied (or is it the same story?), noirish tale of lust and murder.

Or is it? Continue Reading »

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The Visionary Filmmaker Refuses to De-Mystify his Enigmatic Movie.

Article by Steve Biodrowski

LOST HIGHWAY has many moments that clearly identify it as a “David Lynch Film,” but that film did not spring from his mind alone. Having written many scripts on his own, what did he hope that co-writer Barry Gifford would add? “It’s action and reaction when you’re working with someone,” said Lynch. “I think it’s really wrong to say who does what and who wrote that. It’s really kind of a chemical process: you put those two mechanisms together, and out comes something different than either one of us would do on our own. I don’t know quite how it works, but we both tune in to the same thing, and suddenly it starts letting itself be known.” Continue Reading »

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Making Your Blood Run Cold, Again.

By Steve Biodrowski 

Robert Blake has made a career out of playing realistic, believable characters, whom audiences can as regular, ordinary people - whether a poor young boy in THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE or a streetwise cop BARETTA. In fact, in his most famous (and chilling) feature film performance, he portrayed a real person in Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel IN COLD BLOOD. Therefore, it is a bit of a shock to find this actor suddenly playing not a regular Joe but a surreal character who may or may not exist only in the mind of a demented protagonist. His small but pivotal supporting performance in David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY is one of the film’s many highlights - almost as unnerving, in its own way, as his role in IN COLD BLOOD, though with a strange overlay of dark humor. Of course, the fact that the Mystery Man (as he is billed in the credits) doesn’t exist makes him somewhat less frightening on a visceral level that a real-life psychopathic killer. But the unreal element adds its own layer - a sense of the uncanny, of dread all the more frightening because it is so unspecified and mysterious. Continue Reading »

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David Lynch has often been quoted describing ERASERHEAD as “a dream of dark and troubling things.” Since that 1978 debut, he has gone on to adapt his dream-like sensibility to far more accessible narrative structures. No matter how arresting the imagery is in The Elephant Man and Dune, and no matter how weird things get in Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, the audience basically knows who’s who and what’s happening. In Wild at Heart, Lynch even took a story, from a novel by Barry Gifford, and managed to graft on surreal images without ever quite losing the thread of the main narrative, the “story of Sailor and Lula” (as the book is subtitled). Continue Reading »

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This 1997 effort from David Lynch (co-written with Barry Gifford) is one of the director’s better efforts, but it failed to earn the same rapturous critical reception as BLUE VELVET. Reviewers seemed to see only a rehash of familiar Lynchian motifs, and ignored how expertly orchestrated and synthesized the themes had become in this film. Admittedly, LOST HIGHWAY may lack the shock value of BLUE VELVET (by this time, viewers were trained to expect weirdness from Lynch), but the film is every bit as fine a piece of work, and its demented darkness actually coallesces into a strange kind of giddy joy - not unlike the rush of adrenaline one feels after a brush with danger.

By the time he made this film, Lynch had become so well known as America’s premier Dark Dreamer that the mantle Continue Reading »

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