Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3239 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-07-26
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
You are now entering Interzone, William S Burroughs' phantasmagorical land of junk, paranoia and crawly things. Best travel advice: "Exterminate all rational thought". In David Cronenberg's superbly shot, unnerving warp on the Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch, the novelist himself becomes a main character (played in an implacable monotone by Peter Weller), with elements from Burroughs' life--including the shooting of his wife during a "William Tell" game, and bohemian friends Kerouac and Ginsberg--added to frame the book's wild visions. This is, ironically, a somewhat rational approach to an unfilmable book (and it makes a hair-curling double bill with Barton Fink, another look at writerly madness, with both films sharing Judy Davis). Cronenberg is a natural for oozing mugwumps and typewriters that turn into giant bugs, of course. But in the end, this is really his own vision of the artistic process, rather than Burroughs' hallucinatory descent into hell. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com

Synopsis
The dry wit of William S. Burroughs transfers surprisingly well to the screen, where a pest-control man seeking escape from his troubled existence flees to Interzone, a hallucinatory version of Tangiers, where reality and fantasy have merged. Peter Weller does a dead-on Burroughs impression, and the film follows a bizarre logic and has a dark, rich look that help make it one of Cronenberg's more satisfying works. It's not exactly Burroughs, but it is a strange, surreal landscape inhabited by half-alien, half-insect creatures and bizarre humans. And, like all other Cronenberg films it's a bit squishy; it is full of the biological dread that pervades all his films. Make no mistake, this film is not exactly faithful to the novel, and Cronenberg provides it with a neat framework, beginning and ending with Benway accidentally(

Customer Reviews

not sure
i have been looking forward to reading the book but i thought i would save some time and watch the film too. However it was an awfully confusing concept to deal with and i really didn't understand half of the thing. Shame because i'd looked forward to the story for so long and it sort of diappointed me.

Cronenberg Mark-1 Saliva Swab
This isn't the book, Caveat Emptor. I can understand that filming thousand's of drug-addled hipsters storming through the United Nations whilst defecating on "pacts and treaties" may be a little expensive at the least (and, considering that this is a more sane phrase from the text, possibly prohibited by law). So, what's Canada's own Monster-From-The-Id to do? Ah well, take the framework from "Videodrome", and elucidate on that. Take elements from "The Fly" and de-construct that. Ad nauseum.

That's why this movie is less laudable than Cronenberg's other works - He's basically ripping himself off. And that's not something to be applauded. Watch "The Brood" instead - At least he's only ripping Larry Cohen off for that film. An improvement.

Umm, I didn't get it...
I was anticipating great things from this film, but unfortunately I just didn't get it. Way too weird for me - sorry