Wild at Heart

Dir: David Lynch
Star: Nicholas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton

[7] Judging from the furore round this one, I was expecting Dawn of the Dead crossed with Debbie Does Dallas. It's not, despite some messy bits that suggest Peter Jackson was a second unit director. Cage and Dern are Sailor and Lula, lovers who run off, pursued by a detective and a vicious hit man, both unleashed by Lula's vengeful mother. Lynch keeps his audience on their toes by spraying fragments from The Wizard of Oz left & right and throwing in disconcerting sequences that would get laughed off screen anywhere else - it's all played with straight faces for most of the time. The occasional flash of genius succeeds in lighting up the movie like the fires which punctuate it and it's often these seeming irrelevancies that are most chilling, as when the lovers come across a car accident and are forced to watch one of the passengers die, but it lacks a really powerful central performance to hold the whole thing together. A flawed diamond.

8/10

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