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Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider ... see more see more... , Monique Mercure , Nicholas Campbell , Michael Zelniker , Robert A. Silverman , Joseph Scorsiani , Claude Aflalo , Peter Boretski , Deirdre Bowen , Michael Caruana , Yuval Daniel , Joseph Di Mambro , John Friesen , Laurent Hazout , Howard Jerome , Justin Louis , Sean McCann , Kurt Reis , Julian Richings , Jim Yip , Ornette Coleman , Barre Phillips

This cinematic/literary hybrid fuses motifs from Beat writer William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name with elements of the author's biography and plenty of the cerebral alienation and biomorphic ... read more read more...special effects fans of creepy cult director David Cronenberg have come to expect. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) wants to write, but he exterminates bugs to pay the bills. His wife, Joan (Judy Davis), becomes addicted to Bill's bug powder dust, and soon he joins her in a world of unorthodox hallucinogens; he visits the kindly yet sinister Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) and walks away with his first dose of the black meat -- a narcotic made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. Soon, monstrous beetles are whispering conspiracy theories in Bill's ears and his nebbish writer friends Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker) are sleeping with Joan under his nose. When a party trick involving a liquor glass and a gun goes awry, killing Joan, Bill flees to Interzone, a Mediterranean city full of talking insectoid typewriters, double agents, offbeat aesthetes, and plots within plots. As he navigates this paranoid landscape, Bill begins ingesting another drug called mugwump jism and writes fragments that Hank and Martin soon assemble into a novel under the title Naked Lunch. As beat literature aficionados know, Interzone is based on Tangiers -- the city where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. The incident in the film in which Hank and Martin appropriate Bill's writing and have it published closely approximates the real-life circumstances of the novel's publication, although it was Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who helped out the real-life Burroughs. The William Tell incident that kills Bill's wife is also drawn from the author's real life. "William Lee" is both Burroughs' literary stand-in and the name under which he published his first autobiographical novel Junky. Ian Holm, who plays Joan Frost's husband, Tom, would appear in Cronenberg's similarly experimental eXistenZ several years later. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi

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R, 1 hr. 57 min.

Directed by: David Cronenberg

Release Date: December 27, 1991

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DVD Release Date: November 11, 2003

Stats: 2,140 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (2,140)

  • FrizzDrop
    January 26, 2012
    FrizzDrop
    A surrealist film from the debonair auteur with a flair for the unsettling: David Cronenberg. Adapted from the William S. Burroughs novel and starring the eccentric yet keen Peter Weller, there is a fine line between utmost devotion and utter loathing for this film. For me it was... read moren't exactly the realism in the fantasies as seen through the eyes of a puritanical junkie, but how these obvious hallucinations interacted with the fantastical plot and the cavalcade of characters. The film follows an exterminator named William Lee who becomes addicted to the bug powder he peddles, and starts having intense and very specific kinds of hallucinations that drive him to start a life of crime, insanity, and commonly talking to his typewriter. These hallucinations tell him that he's a secret agent, his wife is against him, and homosexuality is a sin but is essential in the line of duty. Throughout the film visions of talking cockroaches/typewriters, and out of this world octopus hybrids are seamlessly strung along the plot to encompass the true absurdity of the situation. William Lee is an interesting character on his own, without the eccentricities that being a junkie include. He's cryptic with his words, and the strange speeches he spills forth are slightly egomaniacal and very isolating. He still interacts with the populous while hiding in plain sight, but when he is alone it's a depth of darkness that has to stay hidden and leads to more egotistical rants by William himself. The reason this film is so unbelievably amazing to me is that he recognizes that these hallucinations are just that in the beginning, the fact that a bug was communicating with him was something that led to his mind expelling the beast. Still, his problematic brain and his dire reality fuse to become a powder keg of insecurities. He knows these things are in his mind, but he's not sure if he's replacing them with actual human contact or it's an amalgamation of the drugs and what we all call reality. It's the fact that we only see a small glimpse of truth, once during the film, and the rest is some dream sequence with no true parameters except a timeline, which makes this genius. Yes, the bugs and parasitic creatures are unsettling and have the same monotone, warbling voices, but they're all part of the mindset of a very imbibed individual. The one thing that perturbed me was the psychotic ending with the strange yet logical reveal. It was too crazy, too convoluted and intricate to be a hallucination. While this film is not for everyone, it does give a great interpretation of a comparatively half-real life, powered by a strong drug of choice.
  • blkbomb
    January 22, 2012
    blkbomb
    Bill Lee: America is not a young land. It is old and dirty, evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians, the evil is there, waiting. 

    "Exterminate all rational thought."

    Beyond bizarre. So far beyond bizarre that it's hard to organize my thoughts about what I have just seen. ... read moreAll I know for sure is that in the end, I really didn't care for it.

    For the first half hour or so, I was in love with the movie. I found the whole insect poison as a drug thing interesting. As the film went on, I started to fall out of love with it. Then altogether, I just lost interest in what I was seeing. The viewing experience is very much like getting high. At first your having fun, it is a great time; but you must come down, and I did... hard. 

    To explain more than a few details of this plot would be tedious. So I'll just keep it to the bare minimums. An exterminator learns that his wife has been stealing his powder and has been shooting it up. His wife then turns him, an ex-junkie himself, onto the drug and soon is just as addicted as his wife. Then he starts hallucinating. Bugs are telling him secret information about all sorts of wild stuff. For awhile, the bug scenes are incredibly interesting, but after the third or fourth one, they become boring. 

    I won't say that I hated this movie altogether. Maybe with another watch later in life, I'll enjoy the whole experience more. Cronenberg is just a weird director and that's what makes him so interesting. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of him, yet. I've only seen five of his movies and I have fallen completely in love with any of them. But one thing I will say is that the bizarreness of Cronenberg is much easier to watch and get through, than that of Lynch.

    If this plot at all interests you, I would at least give it a shot. It's well made and big time fans of Cronenberg should love it. Even if you don't like it in the end; there's enough interesting stuff going on, that it won't feel like you just completely wasted your time. You are sure to see images that you have never seen in another movie.
  • fb1664868775
    October 27, 2011
    fb1664868775
    Adapting an unadaptable book, Cronenberg works weird Sci-Fi magic with this strange movie experience.
  • bottcorecords1
    October 7, 2011
    bottcorecords1
    "It's a literary high. It's a kafka high, you feel like a bug". So says Joan Lee, who has adopted the new and interesting drug habit of shooting up her exterminator husband Bill's bug poison. Not too much later, Bill accidentally shoots his wife in the head while playing a dru... read morenken round of "William Tell" (trying to shoot a glass off of her head). This sends him spiraling into the mad world of "interzone", some northern african land (Tangier?) full of secret agent bugs that disguise themselves as sexual typewriters, and secret lesbian cults. Director David Cronenberg somehow captures the madness of the fifties "beat" culture and the comedic darkness of both the Naked Lunch novel and the life of it's author, William S. Burroughs in a film that also manages to tell a linear story in the process. The artistic process, the literary process, the romantic process, and the effect of hard drugs on the state of the creative mind are all themes explored within the movie. It's the mad adventure of losing touch with reality, and living the life of a secret agent in one's own mind.
  • tolkienfan101
    September 27, 2011
    tolkienfan101
    David Cronenberg's film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch is so unwatchable, so shocking, so unnerving I consider it not only a film worthy of all of its hype, but also the polar opposite or antagonist of the book and Terry Gilliam film adaptation of Hunter S.... read more Thompson's work, Fear and Loathing in Lost Vegas. Where Thompson's and Gilliam's works are more mental trips of great cultural investigation portrayed through massive drug binges and psychedelic adventures accompanied by the music and fashion of the hippie movement, Naked Lunch is deep, depressing, cynical, and beyond out of control, in the worst possible way. As opposed to Fear and Loathing, where I could see a lot of fun and personal reflection and discovery amidst the chaos, Naked Lunch is basically the worst high ever experienced, void of catharsis or a clear social or cultural ultimatum. From talking typewriters in the shape of giant homicidal beetles to killing his wife by shooting her in the face, it sets the sights on the utter depravity of the quest for peace of mind and in the process of completely and abysmally failing at this, it also, in a strange way, shows what is advertently wrong with much of the world. This also paints a very vivid and disgusted picture of the death of the American Dream, which preempted Thompson's Fear and Loathing (which more clearly stated this conclusion) by 13 years. Though the film is more of an investigation into Burrows' actual life than following the book, it still represents the air of the novel and the constant indiscernible switch between reality and horror keeps you on edge. No, it is not at all an easy film to sit through and no, not everything makes sense, sometimes not in the slightest. It also represents the great tumultuous inner conflict of the world of a massively dehumanized and well-spoken drug addict. William S. Burrows was injecting everything from heroin to morphine and even melting down and injecting insecticide. This tale starts in reality, but soon after the stasis is left behind, there is never again a clear definable line on where the real world starts and Burroughs' drug-induced world of the Interzone begins. A definite recommendation, but only if you have a strong stomach to see William's twisted mental fragments and horrifying life while writing the novel and David Cronenberg's lust for things cinematically savage and unsparing.
  • TheDudeLebowski65
    June 16, 2011
    TheDudeLebowski65
    David Cronenberg's adaptation of William Burrough's Naked Lunch is one of the most bizarre Sci Fi horror films to come out in a long time. no other director could accomplish such a a bizzare cinematic experience than David Cronenberg. Combining his eccentric filmmaking with an e... read morequally disturbed book for its source of inspiration, David Cronenberg has crafted a film that really twists your mind and shatters reality.The novel by William Burroughs was deemed unfilmable, but Cronenberg has successfully adapted the book to the screen, to horrifying and bizarre results. Naked Lunch is a film that spans different genres into one film, and what you get here is a film that is a surrealistic nightmare much like David Lynch's Eraserhead. Naked Lunch is a different change of pace for David Cronenberg, but it still has all his usual trademarks. The cast in Naked Lunch are terrific and Peter Weller here delivers his best performance since Robocop. Naked Lunch is a well crafted surrealistic sci fi horror film that keeps you interested because it dwells on the bizarre, a subject that David Cronenberg has long mastered. The film has many memorable scenes and stands out as another phenomenal Cronenberg film.
  • fb619846742
    January 27, 2011
    fb619846742
    A disappointing, over-rated movie detailing the struggles of writing and the affects it has on an exterminator's (Peter Weller) life. While certainly ambitious and appropriately weird based on the director's (the quite average David Cronenberg) style, this film ultimately suffers... read more from a glacial pace as well as a hard-to-follow storyline. This movie challenges you to think and pay attention to every detail, however minuscule it might appear, perceiving its audience to be intelligent and to be able to know enough to "get by" at the end. The non-linear fashion helps keep the the film watchable since you are constantly trying to figure out what is going on, but in other ways it slows the movie down when none of the dialogue or characters make much sense. Peter Weller's simple, somewhat robotic performance fits this piece perfectly, unfortunately the way this thing plods along in addition to a weird subplot (dealing with the subject of homosexuality - which seems to go nowhere) drag this thing into mediocrity. With that said, the creatures and visuals on display here, as well as some of the ideas, are undeniably impressive, but in the end that does not make the movie worth sticking through.
  • hunterjt13
    November 21, 2010
    hunterjt13
    I think one has to evaluate films like this based on level of engagement; after all, the film sets out to violate all narrative conventions, and most of the other categories by which we judge films don't apply or the filmmakers intentionally ignore. So, I give this film two star... read mores based on my purely subjective lack of engagement.
    One obvious problem I had: the Arab world is once again portrayed as the place from which all strangeness comes. In a film that makes up various locales and has bug powder stand in for heroin, it is odd that one of the realities in the film is a narrow-minded conception of Arabia.
    William S. Burroughs, the author of the novel upon which this film is based, didn't believe in revision, a lesson I contradict to my students. Burroughs believed that the first thought was always the best, the most true, the most expressive of author's intent. And by way of apology/explanation, this theory is advocated by the film's characters. Indeed, I see Naked Lunch as being more about writing than it is about a drug-addicted exterminator navigating a convoluted, noir plot. Lee falls accidentally into writing, much as Burroughs did, and he has a complex, adversarial relationship with the tools of his trade (the typewriters turn into talking bugs who tell him to seduce various other characters). It seems as though Naked Lunch is attempting to problematize the written word and the process by which it's produced.
    Perhaps because I'm a writer and teacher of writing, this part of the plot spoke to me. The rest of it just climbed up various rungs on the fucked-up ladder.
  • ceWEBrity
    August 27, 2010
    ceWEBrity
    I really feel that I have no place to analyze what I've seen (though I adored the abstract sensory perversity of it). Is it Cronenberg? Is it Burroughs? Cronenberg doing a Burroughs about Burroughs? Somehow I doubt it's that literal.

    Maybe after I read the book.
  • bbcfloridabound
    May 5, 2010
    bbcfloridabound
    This is a very crazy movie, comes from a book during the 1950 era, and the author had to be on drugs. About a Pest Exterminator that uses his power to put in his veins rather then in his equipment, and we go on his internal mind voyages. The movie was one that made me wonder how ... read morethe hell did it get on my list to see, so I ask are any of you to blame, did any of you recommend it to me????? I plead with you past this one up and do something better like go lay out in the sun till your skin blisters, it will be less painful, 1 Star and I am being nice.

    .

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Critic Reviews

Cole Smithey
July 18, 2009
Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com

...very nearly accomplishes the book's goal of "extinguishing all rational thought." Full Review

Philip Martin
September 5, 2007
Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

a respectful fugue on Burroughs' life and art ... It can be forgiven its acolyte's soul, for it is willing ...to confront Burroughs' signature themes of addiction and control, and to meld them into ..... Full Review

Urban Cinefile Critics
May 5, 2007
Urban Cinefile Critics, Urban Cinefile

This is the only film in which a typewriter beetle kills another typewriter beetle for being a secret agent. I mention it only because of the relevance of the written word, and typewriters %u2013 port... Full Review

Dan Fienberg
September 8, 2005
Dan Fienberg, Zap2it.com

Given that nobody could really have adapted Burroughs' book in any literal manner, what Cronenberg does instead is predictably creepy, warped and dreamy.

Dennis Schwartz
January 18, 2004
Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

Stands on its own apart from the book. Full Review

Mark Robison
January 5, 2004
Mark Robison, Reno Gazette-Journal

There are no great scenes, just flat moments of weirdness with lots of schlorping noises.

Nick Davis
August 15, 2003
Nick Davis, Nick's Flick Picks

One of Cronenberg's most difficult but deliriously clever and emotionally insinuating films.

Greg Muskewitz
July 10, 2003
Greg Muskewitz, eFilmCritic.com

Cronenberg's overly-ambitious attempt at filming the unfilmable.

Walter Chaw
March 9, 2003
Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central

At root the most personal mission statement of a vital cinematic voice. Full Review

Rob Thomas
March 6, 2003
Rob Thomas, Capital Times (Madison, WI)

Cronenberg is the right man for a very, very odd job.

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