Blue Velvet (R, 1986)

Innocent college student Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) returns to his all-American hometown of Lumberton to help run his ill father's hardware store and discovers an ant-covered human ear in a field. Jeffrey dutifully alerts the local sheriff but can't resist doing some amateur sleuthing himself -- with the help of the sheriff's pretty daughter Sandy (Laura Dern). Jeffrey finds his own perfect-looking neighborhood conceals a monstrous subculture of sadistic outlaws and crooked cops. He winds up caught in the middle of a sordid sexual relationship between seductive, victimized night-club singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) and a psychotic, drug-addicted fiend named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper).

Among younger, horror-fixated viewers, filmmaker David Lynch enjoys a mad-scientist reputation for his movies, commonly full of grotesque, nightmarish images (often messily violent) and extreme behavior. Though not recommended for young viewers, BLUE VELVET is no "torture-porn" or slasher-splatter action Hollywood commonly aims at the teen market, but a carefully composed and paced tale that still manages to be disturbing on its own terms.

The film-noir crime plot, deliberately vague about details, unravels like a slow-motion bad dream with a uniquely absurd internal logic; for example, awful Frank works himself into a homicidal frenzy with gentle, vintage tunes like the title easy-listening song (and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams"), and somehow that's creepier than if it were the most vile gangsta rap on the soundtrack. Characters all seem exaggerated (icons of either apple-pie goodness or diabolical malice), giving the thing a faintly satirical edge, and while Jeffrey shows suitable disapproval at Dorothy's plight and good triumphs over wickedness, a sense of perversity and weirdness lingers even past the happy-ending closing sequence.