Unlike everyone says, "Wild at Heart" is far from being David Lynch's worst film. Actually, there is a part of me that even thinks it's a masterpiece. As a parody, it doesn't have the gloomy atmosphere of "Blue Velvet", but personally, I found it even more extreme and uncompromising. I understand that it could be a bit too much to handle though: the cartoonish characters and the cheap soap opera overacting that characterized Twin Peaks are not for everyone, and the pulpy sex and gore make everything feel even more grotesque. I mean, people's brains getting blown out, continuous Wizard of Oz references, and Nic Cage singing Elvis songs and dancing with karate chops at a power metal gig, all in the same movie! Retrospectively we can describe it as a Tarantino-style movie, but we should not forget that Tarantino was not even close to debuting at the time "Wild at Heart" was shot. The plot is partly based on the pulp-noir novel of the same name, and is overall pretty straightforward: Lula and Sailor are two rebels in love who decide to hit the road so that no-one can drive them apart anymore. Lula's mother is an evil witch who sends a private eye and a hitman after them. Lynch decides to add all kinds of weird diversions along the way, with some of the craziest, creepiest characters he ever created. More than the original story itself, these diversions are the things that make the film truly memorable. Unlike "Twin Peaks" and "Blue Velvet", there is no light to balance the sleaze and darkness, no coffee and cherry pie after the nightmare. Lula and Sailor are naive and madly in love, but they just feel like cheap and shallow caricatures, you couldn't care less about them. I understand that the movie aims at creating a world and characters rather than just telling a coherent story, but some focus on the plot wouldn't have hurt. Mr. Reindeer, the Durango gang and Marcellus Santos are iconic characters with their own story arcs, but the film forgets about them halfway through. Marietta even gets "erased" for convenience. Willem Dafoe as Bobby Peru is one of the creepiest Lynchian villains ever, but gets disposed of a bit too easily. It's like they shot what they could and then abruptly closed the film with a pre-made happy ending. Regardless, the countless iconic scenes and over the top pulp still make "Wild at Heart" one of my personal David Lynch favorites.

The magical world of David Lynch appears in this steamy movie

Wild at heart isn't amazing by any means, but I somehow enjoy it each watch more than I thought I would have before watching it the first time. It's cheesy at parts but has just enough of that weird vibe from Lynch to keep me interested.

David Lynch's Wizard of Oz is really a trip and a half! All jokes aside, while the actors give out some incredible performances, and Lynch's signature style is on display here, the story just felt way too disjointed for my taste. Like many of Lynch's works, you'll find moments that feel like some fantastical fever dream, such as the scene where Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are a couple throwing boots in the pit at a thrash metal concert, when some guy starts to get all up in Dern's business, and Cage halts the metal music by raising one hand at the band, tells the dude off, and then proceeds to sing an Elvis song, complete with girls screaming and hips swaying, while the band backs him up as though they've been waiting for a chance to play a slow love ballad all their lives. And despite the fact that these moments tend to deter the overall storytelling, and usually tend to make me dislike Lynch's screenplays more than I enjoy them, these are simultaneously also my favorite moments in his films for the sheer absurdist factor. All in all, this film feels kind of like if Lynch took the spirit of Blood Simple and Paris, Texas, put them in a blender, mixed them up, and seasoned the resulting mixture with the Good Witch's fairy dust. I don't think I enjoyed the film as a whole, but it had some great moments. Is it worth a watch just for that? Probably. Would I recommend it to anyone? Probably not.

This felt like the anti Natural Born Killers and maybe a little bit Paris, Texas. I love NBK and hate Paris, Texas so this was not for me. I don’t understand and perhaps I don’t want to understand.