Product Details

• Actors: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider
• Directors: David Cronenberg
• Writers: David Cronenberg, William S. Burroughs
• Producers: Gabriella Martinelli, Jeremy Thomas
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: 20th Century Fox
• VHS Release Date: October 9, 2001
• Run Time: 115 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (108 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302390486
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #150,903 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

You are now entering Interzone, William S. Burroughs's phantasmagorical land of junk, paranoia, and crawly things. Best travel advice: "Exterminate all rational thought." In David Cronenberg's superbly shot, unnerving warp on the Burroughs novel, the novelist himself becomes a main character (played in an implacable monotone by Peter Weller), with elements from Burroughs' life--including the shooting of his wife during a "William Tell" game, and bohemian friends Kerouac and Ginsberg--added to frame the book's wild visions. This is, ironically, a somewhat rational approach to an unfilmable book (and it makes a hair-curling double bill with Barton Fink, another look at writerly madness, with both films sharing Judy Davis). Cronenberg is a natural for oozing mugwumps and typewriters that turn into giant bugs, of course. But in the end, this is really his own vision of the artistic process, rather than Burroughs's hallucinatory descent into hell. --Robert Horton

From The New Yorker

David Cronenberg's movie isn't really an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' famous novel. It's more like a brisk and well-organized tour of Burroughs Country. The movie is content to pay homage to the novel; Cronenberg's screenplay is an attempt to imagine where this bizarre, unaccountable work of genius might have come from, to get inside the mind of a writer caught in the unnatural act of making literature. The hero is a gaunt, ghostly-looking junkie called William Lee (Peter Weller)-a name Burroughs often used to designate his fictional alter ego. And the primary setting is a place called Interzone, a fever-dream rendering of Tangier, where much of the novel was written. The movie amounts to an ingeniously constructed myth of literary inspiration. Weller plays Lee as a dazed automaton and a kind of mystic, and that interpretation is perfectly suited to the movie's image of the artist as the helpless medium of an obscure higher power. Cronenberg accounts for the birth of Burroughs' novel by turning the author into a strung-out St. John of the Cross. This picture is an amazingly tight, coherent piece of work, and it's often funny, but the argument is too tidy and hermetic. Essentially, Cronenberg has made a weird comedy about writing-a narrow, limited subject. The film's striking imagery and peculiar sensibility are surprisingly easy to shrug off. This is a control freak's portrait of a wild man. Also with Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Michael Zelniker, Nicholas Campbell, and Roy Scheider. Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. The score, by Howard Shore, features sax solos by Ornette Coleman. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sad, funny, horrific and intriguing, April 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Naked Lunch [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I'm both a Cronenberg fan and a Burroughs fan, so maybe my review of this film lacks objectivity. That being said, I think Naked Lunch is quite an achievement, not only visually (Chris Walas' creatures are wonderful, Denise Cronenberg's costumes are elegant and authentic to the film's period), but in terms of screenwriting and in the realm of ideas. Burroughs' novel could be said to be about a number of things, but I believe the film is mainly about how our appetites and urges manifest themselves if they are not acknowledged. Bill Lee, the protagonist in the movie, spends much of the first part of the film avoiding his need to write. After he flees to Interzone, he begins to hallucinate that his typewriter is a giant talking bug that orders him to compile "reports" on various and sundry people and subjects, such as his sexual proclivities, his relationships with friends and acquaintances as well as his need to have a reason to create. Much is made, subtly about the connection between mental imbalance, orgasms and the creative process.Cronenberg has picked up on a theme that runs through all of Burroughs' writing, namely the consequences of living in a society that labels immoral all healthy forms of personal release. For Burroughs, and by extension Cronenberg, this includes sex, artistic expression and liberated use of language. In the novel, being denied these outlets leads people to all kinds of perversions of personal power, drug addiction and insanity. Cronenberg uses different means, but shows his audience the psychic toll of denying one's deep personal needs.In all, a fantastic hallucinatory ride, with a great cast (especially Peter Weller, who has never been better chosen for a role) and a whole feast for discussion by thoughtful filmgoers everywhere.

38 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fitting Tribute to Burroughs, March 20, 2000

By 

Jill Traynor - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Lunch [VHS] (VHS Tape)

As a devout Burroughs fan, of course I was a little hesitant to view this movie initially. And having read the book "Naked Lunch" prior to watching the film, I was at a loss as to what I expected. Certainly there was no way this book could translate into a movie...even "The Wall" director Alan Parker would have been lost.

In essence, Cronenberg didn't attempt to recreate the book verbatim. Instead he deftly interwove Burroughs' life with some of the routines and rants from the book. This movie is not for the fainthearted as it shows man-sized mugwumps and talking typwriter/insects who are really operatives for a covert attempt to penetrate Interzone, using a hapless writer, Bill Lee, as their chief spy.

Definitive moments in Burroughs' life, such as his relationship with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and the death of his wife Joan at his own hand are featured in the movie. It also gives a surreal biography to the birth of the writer in Burroughs as he attempts to write his way out of the guilt of his wife's death and the drugs that numbed the difficulties of his life.

Those who think that this movie had no real plot or if they did think there was a plot that the plot wasn't linear, then they can't be that big a fan of Burroughs. His life was not normal, his fans are not normal, and his mode of thinking was, frankly, insane. Cronenberg does a brilliant job getting inside the mind of the writer, the genius, the man, William S. Burroughs. Take a trip into his mind, ladies and gentlemen, and be changed forever.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's a literary high, November 25, 2003

By 

SPM "scott_maykrantz" (Eugene, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Lunch (The Criterion Collection) (DVD)

Cronenberg's version of Naked Lunch is a brilliant combination of Burroughs' novel and Burroughs' life. He blends the true story of Burroughs life (and his reason for writing) with the surreal dark-comedy 'routines' of the novel until they become one story. The story is a quiet hallucination featuring exterminators, addiction, typewriters in the form of insects, typewriters that grow genitals, a global conspiracy of intelligence agents, the drug trade, homosexual ambiguity, writer's block, accidental murder, and literary paranoia. None of these elements is explored completely. Instead, Cronenberg touches on each one until they form some strange, underlying logic.

This edition of the DVD has enough extras to make it the only version of Naked Lunch you'll ever have to buy. (They won't release a bigger, better edition later.) The BBC documentary is okay. It's about 45 minutes long, giving Cronenberg and William Burroughs a lot of time to speak. (Burroughs is particularly good, with a dry sense of humor and a habit of saying obvious truths that make people uneasy.) The second disc also has stills from the special effects team, showing how the various creatures and organic typewriters were developed.

But it's the first disc --- the movie itself --- that makes it worth buying and watching. The special audio track, shared by Peter Weller and Cronenberg, adds a lot of useful background information. The film itself is bright and sharp, a perfect example of DVD clarity. I highly recommend this DVD to anyone who is interested in the best films of the 1990s. Naked Lunch didn't make as big an impact in theaters as it did in book stores, but it should have.