Product Description

Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rosselini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern Set in the picture-postcard small town environs of Lumberton, Kyle MacLachlan plays the clean cut Jeffrey Beaumont, who whilst returning form a visit to his hospitalised father, makes the shocking discovery of a severed human ear. After reporting his discovery to a local police detective, Jeffery decides to pursue his own line of enquiry, aided by the detective's daughter, Sandy Laura Dern. This sets Jeffrey on a voyage of discovery that takes him to the very heart of Lumberton's seedy and sinister underworld where he encounters a collection of misfits who's various chronic compulsions to engulf him in their twisted and nightmarish world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3525 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-10-04
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 115 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
David Lynch peeks behind the picket fences of small-town America to reveal a corrupt shadow world of malevolence, sadism and madness. From the opening shots Lynch turns the Technicolor picture postcard images of middle-class homes and tree-lined lanes into a dreamy vision on the edge of nightmare. After his father collapses in a preternaturally eerie sequence, college boy Kyle MacLachlan returns home and stumbles across a severed human ear in a vacant lot. With the help of sweetly innocent high school girl (Laura Dern), he turns junior detective and uncovers a frightening yet darkly compelling world of voyeurism and sex. Drawn deeper into the brutal world of drug dealer and blackmailer Frank, played with raving mania by an obscenity-shouting Dennis Hopper in a career-reviving performance, he loses his innocence and his moral bearings when confronted with pure, unexplainable evil. Isabella Rossellini is terrifyingly desperate as Hopper's sexual slave who becomes MacLachlan's illicit lover, and Dean Stockwell purrs through his role as Hopper's oh-so-suave buddy. Lynch strips his surreally mundane sets to a ghostly austerity, which composer Angelo Badalamenti encourages with the smooth, spooky strains of a lush score. Blue Velvet is a disturbing film that delves into the darkest reaches of psycho-sexual brutality and simply isn't for everyone. But for a viewer who wants to see the cinematic world rocked off its foundations, David Lynch delivers a nightmarish masterpiece. --Sean Axmaker

Special Features
English
PCM English
PCM

Synopsis
A deeply shocking and insidiously funny film, David Lynch's offbeat vision uncovers the nasty underside of small-town America. When a young man finds a human ear in a field, he embarks on an investigation into the dark world of a dangerous psychopath, which leads him to a beautiful nightclub singer. Truly an auteur film, if there is such a thing, BLUE VELVET is a bizarre, disturbing work that stands as one of the best films of the 1980s.

Customer Reviews

Grotesque...
Why is there so much praise for this horrifically bad film?!?


My friend Lewis leant me this last night and I really am racking my brain as to what I did to suggest to him I might like such an insipid, juvenile and offensive film!

Here, I'll outline the plot for you so you can save yourself the trouble of finding out by watching it:

James Lorinz plays Jeffery Beaumont, a student kicked out of medical college for strange experiments, who moves back into his parents because of a family emergency. He falls into a relationship with a local girl (Patty Mullen) who suffers a great misfortune. Unable to handle the loss, Jeffery uses parts of local prostitutes (that he MURDERS with a modified version of crack cocaine that makes users EXPLODE called "Super crack") to rebuld her body and bring her back to life. However, the pimp who looks after these prostitutes is Frank Booth (played by Joseph Gonzalez with more than a passing resemblance to Dennis Hopper) comes looking for them and needless to say, needless smut and stupid jokes abound. The ending of the film tries so hard to be shocking but it's just funny.

This is a really bad film and I don't think I'll ever take anyone who lieks it seriously again.

Absolutely brilliant.
First up, the DVD quality. Appalling. Terrible. No better than VHS. I've read most of the preceding reviews, and everyone seems to have a problem with the picture quality and not the film (rightly so). But seriously, any DVD collection without 'Blue Velvet' in it, quite frankly isn't a collection. This movie is solid gold brilliance from one of cinema's true originals, David Lynch. Lynch took horror movie conventions (make things familiar, then twist them)and ran out of sight of the competition.

On the discovery of a severed ear, our young protagonist Jeffrey (Kyle Maclachlan), decides to turn detective. He quickly realises that nightclub singer Dorethy Valens (Isabella Rossallini) is in serious trouble with some very nasty people. And in the performance that resurrected his career, Dennis Hopper arrives as the nuttier than squirrel poop psycho killer, Frank Boothe, who shows Jeffrey the darkness within himself.

By this point, suspend your disbelief and throw logic out the window as David Lynch piles on the bizarre images with reckless abandon. Severed ears, amyl-nitrate toting facemasks, Roy Orbison and one of the most bizarre death tableaus you'll ever see (no I won't tell you, you'll have to watch).

Every performance is terrific (particularly Hopper's), the 50's inspired visuals are beautiful and look out for Quantum leap's Dean Stockwell in a remarkably creepy cameo.

So don't let the rubbish picture quality put you off. This is way up there with the 80's best.

Stunning film, flawed DVD edition
Not sure how to rate this DVD, but here it goes...

There's no doubt that Blue Velvet is an extraordinary film, so that would be 5 stars.

However, by all means, avoid the version from Prism Leisure, its quality is absolutely appalling and doesn't do the film justice - *zero* stars.

It isn't full-screen format and exhibits a lot of digital noise in the darker scenes, making it impossible to recommend. Do yourself a favour and look for a better edition.