Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1273 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-06-04
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
• Dubbed in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 121 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
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

Customer Reviews

yummy! =)
this movie is a classic mind bender! if you like david lynch's other stuff, like lost highway or wild at heart, you will like this. oh, mommy! ;)

Good Movie
I had never heard of this movie until I was watching a TV show that was describing the 10 best crime movies. I ordered it new and was pleased with the movie and the prompt delivery from Amazon.

The Hardy Boys investigate a real mystery
After his father has a stroke, clean-cut college student Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle McLaughlin) returns home to help out in his father's hardware store. While walking in a field one day, he discovers a severed ear which leads him and girlfriend, policeman's daughter, Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), on a Hardy Boys-esque investigation that takes them to the dark underbelly of their perfect American small town existence.

Imagine a 1930's film noir with sex and drugs, and the Hardy Boys as detectives, and you've got a pretty good idea of what this film is about. "Blue Velvet" takes standard crime film elements that you have seen dozens of times before and combines them into one of the most original films you have ever seen in your life. The central theme of this film is the battle between all that is wholesome, or good and that which is corrupt, or evil. The side of good is represented by Jeffery Beaumont, sort of a real-world Frank Hardy and a forerunner to McLaughlin's "Twin Peaks" character, Dale Cooper. Between Jeffery Beaumont and Dale Cooper, to me, McLaughlin is the face of innocence and this film is all about the loss of that innocence and its redemption. On the side of evil is drug-addicted, expletive-spewing Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), truly the most frightening and disturbing villain ever.

"Blue Velvet" is a very nasty, in-your-face movie that is most certainly not for all tastes (I read on the internet that many people walked out when this film was first shown in cinemas and I can see why). It is also a very weird film (although, by the standards set by David Lynch's other movies, this film is positively normal) and many scenes in it are designed to be endured rather than enjoyed. Yet, unlike many other similarly dark films, I didn't come out of this film feeling dirty (something that I felt after seeing "Sin City"). I felt that, just like Jeffery Beaumont, I had journeyed to the underworld but had returned, and in the course of that return, any evil that I had encountered had been washed away. For this reason, if you do see this film, I recommend that you stay with it until the end. The middle might be bad, but in the end, all is restored.