BEFORE: This one's been on the books for a long time, because if I'm working thematically, how the heck do I link to a plotline like THIS? I'm just going to lump it in with Hallo-weirdness and hope for the best. Linking from "Repo Man", Harry Dean Stanton was also in a film titled "The Fourth War" with Roy Scheider (last seen in "All That Jazz" back in 2011).
THE PLOT: After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally murders his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in a port town in North Africa.
AFTER: Umm, yeah, so THAT happened. I've had to do a little background research on this film, only to find out that the original novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs was pretty darn un-filmable, being the loose narrative of a junkie whose chapters can be read in any possible order. They kept some elements of the book, like Dr. Benway, and the fictional settings of Interzone and Annexia, but that's about where the similarities cease.
Director David Cronenberg daringly took these pieces and mixed in elements of Burrough's own life, such as accidentally (?) shooting his own wife while playing the "William Tell" game, and the main character here is also an author who ends up writing a stream-of-consciousness story called "Naked Lunch", but also worked in what this film is ultimately most famous for - giant bugs.
There's puppetry and FX worked in, since this film was made in the early 90's, before CGI was fully perfected. This lends it a tangible, organic quality, but yet also makes things look a little low-rent by comparison. I think they were going for something approaching "X-Files"-meets-"Brazil" status, with intelligent bugs using humans as agents to file reports, but everything's just so unclear and obtuse that it's darn near incoherent. The audience is left to fill in a lot of gaps about what's going on, and what it all means, to the point of near madness.
Also, it's worth pointing out that this "bug powder" our hero uses to exterminate roaches also seems to have some hallucinogenic properties - he and several other characters become addicted to the stuff, regardless of its poisonous qualities - so there's the possibility that everything on screen after a certain point is not really happening, except in his own mind. Perhaps he's seeing the giant talking bugs that also function as typewriters and other objects as his way of dealing with other stuff. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a drug addict while using?
But the events in the real world that are then being clouded by the hallucinations are somewhat unsettling too. It almost seems like the main character (possibly representing Burroughs himself) has come up with a convoluted way to explain his sexual and violent tendencies. There can't really be justification for sleeping with another man's wife, or shooting your own wife so you can go have sex with younger men, but if there could be, a creative writer would be the one to find it. But damn, what a long way to go to find yourself. If that's really what's taking place here, and I'm not sure it is.
But unclear and obtuse is often confused with symbolic and artistic, and that's probably what pushes this film into the "cult classic" category. Again, I'm not seeing it, probably because I'm stuck at the "WTF?" stage. Sure, the whole thing's a metaphor, but for WHAT? I guess when he enters "Annexia" at the end, that's a metaphor for becoming a writer, and Burroughs had stated that he never would have become a writer if he hadn't shot his wife. Yeah, good luck with that - let me know how it goes.
Also starring Peter Weller (last seen in "Star Trek Into Darkness"), Judy Davis (last seen in "Marie Antoinette"), Ian Holm (last seen in "The Madness of King George"), Julian Sands (last seen in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo").
RATING: 2 out of 10 "Mugwumps"
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