Parents' Guide to Blue Velvet

Though not recommended for young viewers, BLUE VELVET is no "torture-porn" or slasher-splatter action that Hollywood commonly aims at the teen market. 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 -- but this is actually 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.