Rating: 
Summary: Superb.
Review: David Cronenberg's dazzling sci-fi imagery meets William S. Burroughs' dark humor in this bizarre cult film. Peter Weller plays William Lee, an exterminator who can't seem to keep track of his bug powder. His writer friends hint that it may be a `domestic problem.' Indeed, he finds that his wife is stealing his bug powder for its narcotic effects.At a party with two friends (meant to be Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), Lee nods to his wife and says, `About time for our William Tell act...' Joan balances her highball glass on her head and closes her eyes. Bill isn't such a good shot that night, and accidentally shoots a hole through Joan's forehead. The glass falls to the floor, intact. Soon the police are after Lee. They lock him in a room with a giant bug, who tells him his real identity. It starts him on his journey to Interzone, a strange hallucinatory world inhabited by talking insects, living typewriters, and alien/insect mugwumps that secrete intoxicating juices from the penises on their heads. Lee has a long strange trip in Interzone. His insect typewriter sends him on missions where he meets strange people and even stranger creatures. And all the while he is still on the run from the police. David Cronenberg's screenwriting and directing skills were in top form for this movie. Once called `the king of venereal horror,' his trademark grotesque sexual imagery and bug obsessions, as seen in Videodrome and The Fly, have been honed to give the perfect nightmarish effect. Surely there couldn't be a better man to bring Burroughs' Interzone to the big-screen. The acting was also superb. Wearing a fedora and an anonymous tan overcoat, and speaking in Burroughs' low monotonous drawl, Weller is a very believable William Lee. Judy Davis was also excellent, bringing to life the most three-dimensional portrayal of Joan Vollmer Burroughs ever. The fabulously surreal special effects are sure to draw in Cronenberg fans, and fans of Burroughs will be equally entertained by samplings of the original book's `routines' and parallels to Burroughs' own life. However, Cronenberg isn't known for making accessible movies, and when coupled with Burroughs' characters, this certainly isn't a film for everyone. Rated `R' for heavy drug content, adult language, and `bizarre eroticism,' there are scenes portraying bug powder injection (a heroin metaphor), typewriters with genitalia, and a gay sex scene in which Julian Sands turns into a parrot. But for all the "adult" content, this is a very intelligent, complex, and inspired movie that its viewers will not soon forget.
Rating:
Summary: It's a literary high
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Cool Criterion
Review: This 2 disc criterion collection is a must have for anyone who has a movie collection and is into films of the cult and avant-garde genres. Criterion's Naked Lunch comes with a heavy 32 page booklet that contains articles on the director of the movie (David Cronenberg) and writer William S. Burroughs and more in depth information on the film and the steps it took to get Naked Lunch from book to screen. There is just too much to explain about the film but the DVD itself is a true gem in my collection. PLEASE RE-RELEASE DEAD RINGERS CRITERION EDITION!!!
Rating:
Summary: Develop a Case of Insanity
Review: Cronenberg's Naked Lunch is possibly as close as you will likely get to an adaptation of any of Burrough's books. Cronenberg has mostly derived his own version of the Naked Lunch here and a lot of the original book's elements are missing and Cronenberg has come up with some new entries of his own. However this very loose adaptation can be forgiven and if you have read the book then you are probably more than well aware that the vast majority of it is incoherent and devoid of anything you can call structure or plot but it does have a narrative and this can be found here. Peter Weller is impeccably cast as Bill Lee who is sort of a reworking of Burroughs himself. He plays a writer employed as an exterminator who finds out that his wife is addicted to his bug powder. Under the prying eyes of the drug enforcement agency Bill escapes his life to work for a beetle-typewriter (you have to see that thing!) as an undercover homosexual agent who travels to a place called the "Interzone" to write up daily reports there. The film is provocative and thoroughly insane in every department. The monsters all look genuinely disturbing but even more so when the characters interact with them in the most indescribable of ways. There is a doctor called Benway (Roy Scheider) who appears to be helping Bill to get through his problems of drug addiction and yet turns up later in the film in the most startling of scenes. For a man who once played the lead in "Jaws" it will certainly blow a few minds to see him unzip his breasts. Judy Davis plays Joan Frost and Joan Lee who appear in both the real world and the fantasy world as wife and curiosity of Bill Lee. Davis is on flying 1950s form as usual. Ian Holm plays a man called Tom Frost and you are completely unsure of what he does, but rest assured by the time the credits close you will not care either. Julian Sands plays Yves Cloquet, a very disturbing homosexual monster centipede! Cronenberg has gone out to make the insane and he has succeeded in every department. DO NOT EXPECT A COHERANT MOVIE! This is just all out insanity and fantasy played to a 50s era beat. This is Bill Lee's world and you have not seen anything like it before nor will you ever see anything like it again - so if you like the obnoxious, the extreme, the mad, the unorthodox, the unconventional, the vulgar and the chance to see Peter Weller in a role he was born to play then look no further. This is outstanding cinema and thank God that Cronenberg is around to fill that empty niche nicely. You can say that this film is just incoherent and confusing, but you can not say that it is not original, imaginative, creative or artistic. It is all that and then some more.
Rating:
Summary: A Fitting Tribute to Burroughs
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A difficult film for the average viewer
Review: I actually own the VHS copy, which I believe is unavailable, but I will be picking up the DVD soon. Simply having the film on disc with a commentary is worth the price alone, in my opinion. I have read the book, and Cronenberg did a spectacular job of bringing an unfilmable book to the screen. Since there are so many excellent reviews already, I will only offer two memories of when the film came out in theaters. First, I recall seeing Cronenberg on one of the late night talk shows, either Letterman or Leno, I don't recall. But he stood up from his chair during the conversation, reached his hands out to the audience and said "Look, it's a COMEDY!" signaling to me how misunderstood the film would be. Of course, if you know anything about Cronenberg, you can expect a challenge when you go to the theater. Second, I then saw the film and convinced my wife (then girlfriend) and five of her close friends to see it with me. Within an hour all five of them walked out of the theater and went to see something else (probably with Julia Roberts--Pretty Woman was high on their list of fave films at the time). Upon regrouping the first thing the most enlightened of the five said was "What the hell was THAT?" I didn't understand the film either, and the lack of a real traditional narrative and plot made for a VERY long first viewing. Since then I've read the book and each subsequent viewing of the film brings out more of the great humor. By the way, to fix one previous observation, the sex scene with Julian Sands involves him turning into a giant Centipede (not a parrot), and the image will haunt you forever.
Rating:
Summary: David Cronenberg's Very Best
Review: Before you even try to watch this movie, realize that David Cronenberg's films are among the most bizarre and perplexing films you will ever see. If you like your films to stick to traditional narratives and standard plot devices you will probably hate 'Naked Lunch' (and any other David Cronenberg film you chance to come across). If, however, you are extremely open minded (as in, "I'm open to watching a movie where people have sex with typewriters that turn into giant insects") you may find yourself addicted to Cronenberg's surreal style of film making. 'Naked Lunch' follows the story of a bug-exterminator-cum-secret-agent who...you know what, forget it...because the plot in 'Naked Lunch' isn't really what this movie is about. I'm not going to say that the movie is plot-less (it's not), but the story (an insane organic blend of sections from Burroughs's novel and episodes from his life) exists mainly as an alibi for Cronenberg's signature style of subconscious imagery; more specifically, for his metaphoric exploration of writing as an erotic addictive binge to "exterminate all rational thought." If that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, don't blame me. The fantastic thing about this movie is that it has a twisted logic that is entirely of its own making, and it sits with you. 'Naked Lunch' is a film that is difficult to deal with. It's a movie that I love, and I don't know if that's going to come across in this review. But, 'Naked Lunch' is nothing if not ambiguous, and that's what makes it great art.
Rating: 
Summary: Abominable
Review: First a disclaimer. I didn't read the Borroughs book. Having watched the film, I have no intention to. As far as the movie goes, I couldn't even begin to tell what the plot wass. The entire journey was nauseating; not due to content, but the lack there of. The only thing that kept me going was the faint hope that it would deliver a strong ending. In this aspect, this movie failed to a greater extent than any movie I have ever seen in my life. There wasn't an ending, it was simply a cut to scrolling credits. The only thing I could do was laugh at the idea that maybe someone made this film with the sadistic intent of wasting the time of any audience that might be compelled to watch. I'm sure you can find a better drug movie to spend your time on if you look just a little harder.
Rating:
Summary: Highly original.
Review: Like many previous Cronenberg outings 'Naked Lunch' deals with ideas on how by affecting the body, you alter your reality. In fact there probably wasn't a better director around who could so accurately evoke Burroughs visions. Although 'Interzone' is set in Tangiers, the film crew had to shoot all the interiors in Toronto as North Africa was off limits during the first Gulf War. Films about writers usually involve a static quality where the writer spends a lot of their time in front of the typewriter. Cronenberg has made his writer live the hallucinatory situations that made him put pen to paper. 'Interzone' becomes William Lee's hallucinatory state of mind, where his writings are not just musings on past events, but 'reports' on everything he sees and experiences around him at that moment. Like Max Renn in 'Videodrome', Cronenberg sees Lee's imagination as a disease, as a mind constantly 'on', unable to turn off the constant stream of images that prevades his reality. Cronenberg totally reshaped the original book for the screen, most noticably in playing down the homosexual aspects of the original novel. The 'bug powder' and the black stuff given to Lee by Dr. Benway were used as a euphamism for drugs. Obvious references to coke, heroin and crack weren't used so that there wouldn't be a 'Just Say No' campaign against the film. Although even if named drugs were overtly mentioned, it's difficult to see a mainstream audience coming to a movie like this. 'Naked Lunch' is unlike any movie you've seen before or anyone you're likely to see hence and for that reason alone, it's worth the admission price.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Film... well worth buying it! Drugs not needed.
Review: William S. Burroughs has made a huge influence into my own music/artwork and I saw this film when it was released in the theatres in the early '90's. I still remember coming out of the film sober but with the sense of just been on a psychedelic trip. It's a Great film for all it tries to cover from the life of Burroughs to combining parts from various books of his writings. Although, I'm surprised there was no character to friend/collaborator, Brion Gysin in the film. The 2nd disc is a pretty good making of... Naked Lunch with the thoughts of Burroughs, director David Croenberg, cast Peter Weller etc., and the production. I just wished there was more insight from/on Burroughs, the man but perhaps I'm just being picky. Overall this film/DVD is well worth purchasing for your home collection. It would of been a good packaging decision to have included a paperback edition of the book, Naked Lunch too. I don't buy DVDs just because I like the film. They have to be Great films.
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