Rating: R
Genre:
Avant-garde / Exp
Theatrical Release: 12/27/1991(USA)
Release Date: 11/11/2003
SubTitles: English
Dubbed: English
Sound: DDS
Run Time: 115 Minutes
Flags: Violence, Nudity, Adult Situations, Strong Sexual Content, Not For Children, Profanity, Substance Abuse (Alcohol, Drugs)
Distributor/Studio: Criterion
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 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, All Movie Guide
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