Wild at Heart (1990)

David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” is another slice of a dream-state American pie. Burned to a crisp. Nobody sets a mood quicker or with romantic/doomed/thrilling atmosphere than Lynch, and this film is loaded with scenes beautiful (a couple in love dancing wildly on a desert side road) and hellish (Grace Zabriskie as a wordless demonic killer) and downright weird (Crispin Glover, going 111 on the nut-bucket scale).

The dancing lovers are Nicolas Cage’s Sailor, a newly paroled convict, and Laura Dern’s Lula, an innocent with a her bat-poop crazy momma (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real mother). The couple head West, fleeing mom, who sends a private eye (Harry Dean Stanton) and then a troupe of killers. I won’t dish on the rest of the pretzel-twisty plot, but say only that Lynch riffs off “The Wizard of Oz,” but with hard-core graphic sexual and violent content. There literally is a magic globe, a Wicked Witch and a Good Witch.

There’s so much to love here. A roadside car accident in particular is a dip into tragic/magic life and death as a Sherilyn Fenn plays a young girl whose head literally splits open. (Half the cast came from “Twin Peaks.”) Yet, this whacked trip Cannes Film Festival winner has its faults: Sheryl Lee, the dead Laura Palmer, plays a great corpse. Playing the Good Witch, not so much. She sucks, actually. And Willem Dafoe plays a disgusting, ill-conceived, seedy reincarnation of Frank Booth from “Blue Velvet,” but with a dash of “Deliverance” teeth and the strut of a 13-year-old boy. Dennis Hopper’s Booth came from Hell and remains the absolute movie psychopath. Dafoe’s bonehead is an unfunny joke. And, sure enough, someone’s head is blown off into tiny chunks. Is this Lynch on autopilot?

Side note: I still don’t get Lynch’s apparent fear of North Carolina. (Is it the barbecue?) “Heart” opens in Cape Fear, N.C., not too far off the map from Lumberton, where “Blue Velvet” was set. Or is he just paying homage to the original “Cape Fear” from decades back, as the 1992 remake was not yet released? Not sure...

Oh, this is where Cage’s Elvis homage began, and several years before the former’s career crashed deader than the latter's fat butt. Cage is throbbing with energy here, frightening one moment (the opening scene) and insanely funny the next (“What do you f-----s want?”). He is on 100 percent, though, in a daring, damn the rules role. He needs good directors. Alas, Dern plays another pure girl who bemoans if love is enough to conquer evil and death. Lynch loves a blonde like Hitchcock.

Not Lynch’s best by a long shot, but still a shocking, mind-blowing Avant-Garde treat with scenes that dead end but nevertheless fascinate. “Velvet” from start to finish stays on the soul, and is part of me, whereas “Heart” comes and goes in spurts. Still, less than perfect Lynch is one amazing ride. B+

Eraserhead (1976)

David Lynch’s nightmarish city scapes and twisted viewpoint have never been more warped than in “Eraserhead,” his mid-1970s freakish debut masterpiece. I can’t describe the story, but it follows a frizzy haired loner (Jack Nance) who lives in an apartment right out of a Depression-era nightmare, as far from Wyeth America as one can get. He has a sort-of girlfriend (Charlotte Stewart), who turns up pregnant and delivers … a fetus. Not a baby. But a monstrous, twisted, writhing and screaming fetus that looks more animal than human. Like a Pollack painting, this mind fuck is endlessly debatable. Certainly alienation, probably fear of fatherhood and marriage. I love Lynch’s madness, and this is one of his most bizarre films. All his trademarks are here: curtains, stages where actors sing and perform, angels and demons (that fetus, the monstrous man - the fetus grown up?). Black and white beauty. I’ll say this, nothing in a Lynch film is more poetic than the Woman in the Radiator (!!!) singing, “In heaven, everything is fine.” Brilliant. Warped. Godlike. Unexplainable. One of my favorites. So sad Nance was murdered. A+

Blue Velvet (1986)

"Blue Velvet'' is David Lynch's nightmarish masterpiece about the evil in small town America.

From the get-go we know we're in for a trip to hell as the camera settles in on a seemingly perfect Lumberton, N.C., house with perfectly upbeat music in the background, and then inches ever closer to grass in front of a white picket fence. Within that grass are insects -- filmed so close they appear as monsters, destroying the land they crawl on as they devour each other. The man watering that grass then falls upon the ground from a stroke. With this cooler than hell montage and much of his other work (the pilot to "Twin Peaks" and "The Elephant Man"), David Lynch remains at the top of my list of favorite film makers.

We soon follow Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), the college age son of the stricken man, as he walks home from the hospital. In a field, he starts throwing rocks at an old shack, letting off the anger and grief he feels at his father's illness. Picking up another stone, he finds a severed human ear in the grass. The Intrigued Jeffrey then plunges into a dark, disturbing investigation involving a mysterious singer (Isabella Rossellini), a teenage girl (Laura Dern) and a man (Dennis Hooper) so monstrous you can't argue that he's come directly from Hell.

This is the ultimate FUBAR cult film and Lynch's best work, a brilliant, surrealist drama-noir-mystery with scenes strange (Dean Stockwell lip syncs "In Dreams") and shockingly violent (the physical assault of a woman) that play alive and real. As in his other works, Lynch uses music (the song "Blue Velvet") and the notions of teen love, white picket fences and stoic square-jawed WASP heroes from the 1950s, America's "glory years," to show us the evil that is all around us.

Although Lynch shows us monstrous acts that are as shocking now as when the film premiered more than 20 years ago, he also shows us that love eventually will overcome that evil. His world isn't hopeless after all. You can watch this film a dozen times ands pick out new mysteries and points, or images (red curtains) that appear in nearly all of Lynch's work.

The cast is brilliant, especially MacLachlan's stalwart college boy, but Hopper stands out as what has to be the most depraved, psychopathic character ever put on film. This is a must watch film, if you can stomach it.

One note, I almost moved to the real Lumberton, N.C., to take a job -- while in college. I didn't go. A+