Eraserhead (1977)
Average Rating: 8.2/10
Reviews Counted: 43
Fresh: 39 | Rotten: 4
David Lynch's surreal Eraserhead uses detailed visuals and a creepy score to create a bizarre and disturbing look into a man's fear of parenthood.
Average Rating: 7.1/10
Critic Reviews: 6
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 1
David Lynch's surreal Eraserhead uses detailed visuals and a creepy score to create a bizarre and disturbing look into a man's fear of parenthood.
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Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 53,837
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Movie Info
Filmed intermittently over the course of a five-year period, David Lynch's radical feature debut stars Jack Nance as Henry Spencer, a man living in an unnamed industrial wasteland. Upon learning that a past romance has resulted in an impending pregnancy, Henry agrees to wed mother-to-be Mary (Charlotte Stewart) and moves her into his tiny, squalid flat. Their baby is born hideously mutated, a strange, reptilian creature whose piercing cries never cease. Mary soon flees in horror and disgust,
Jan 1, 1977 Wide
Jun 7, 2005
Libra Films
Watch It Now
Cast
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Jack Nance
Henry Spencer -
Charlotte Stewart
Mary X -
Jeanne Bates
Mrs. X -
Allen Joseph
Mr. X -
Judith Anna Roberts
Girl Across The Hall -
Laurel Near
Lady In Radiator -
V. Phipps-Wilson
Landlady -
Jack Fisk
Man In The Planet -
Darwin Joston
Paul -
Hal Landon Jr.
Pencil Machine Operator -
Gill Dennis
Man with Cigar -
Jennifer Chambers Lynch
Little Girl
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All Critics (43) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (43) | Rotten (4) | DVD (14)
The mind boggles to learn that Lynch labored on this pic for five years.
Top CriticSome of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.
Lynch, as he does with all his films, refuses to explain anything, although he does say that he has yet to read an interpretation that matches his.
What a masterpiece of texture, a feat of artisanal attention, an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze.
Lynch's remarkable first feature is a true original.
It represented a monumental shift in how movies are seen and digested -- one that raised the level of aptitude and film literacy throughout the world.
By now, the most interesting thing about Lynch's cult-classic debut may be the evidence it offers of how fully his sensibility was formed.
As pure cinema, Eraserhead is in a universe all its own, writing and obeying its own oblique rules.
Time drips like old paint in Lynch's surreal experiment, that revels in all things upsetting, disorienting, dark, and mysterious.
David Lynch's remarkable first film, made in 1976, still looks like a minor masterpiece, mixing Gothic horror, surrealism and darkly expressionist mise-en-scène.
David Lynch has "cleaned up" his freaky feature debut, but don't worry - it's still an amazing industrial nightmare.
David Lynch's 1977 feature debut Eraserhead is one of those rare films that really deserves its cult status - a nightmarish, heavily symbolic story set in a postapocalyptic future.
...unwrap this baby and you will discover a whole universe of untold depths and hidden textures in which to become trapped, lost or sublimely elevated. Lynch's debut feature is freakish perfection.
Disturbing, repulsive, hilarious, frightening, sensitive and challenging.
Lynch's films exist independent of space and time, and only after twisting and turning through their labyrinthine visual corridors can we begin to piece together how they came to be in the first place.
Whether there is more here than meets the horrified eye, is debatable, but 'Eraserhead' leaves no viewer cold.
Nothing more than a pretentious, incoherent and boring exercise in self-indulgent weirdness.
The discomfort we feel with the film indicates that the truths contained in Eraserhead, whatever they may be, are as surely true as they are unexamined.
A stream of subconsciousness work of art, Eraserhead is Lynch's most surreal film. Packed with grotesque physical deformity and quest for spiritual purity, the film flaunts eerie sound and brilliant imagery.
Audience Reviews for Eraserhead
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
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- Lady In Radiator: In Heaven, everthing is fine. In Heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things. And I've got mine.
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- Lady In Radiator: In Heaven, everything is fine. In Heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things. And I've got mine.
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- Mrs. X: So Henry, what do you do?
- Henry Spencer: Oh, I'm on vacation.
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- Mary X: You wouldn't mind marrying me, would you Henry?
- Henry Spencer: Well... No.
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- Lady In Radiator: n Heaven, everything is fine. In Heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things. And I've got mine.
Discussion Forum
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| Why do critics always esteem the movies that they can't understand? | 18 days ago | 5 |
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Foreign Titles
- Labyrinth Man (FR)
- Cabeza borradora (ES)
