David Lynch had already introduced himself to an unwary world with Eraserhead (and his “relatively normal”—sorta—studio-backed film, The Elephant Man) when he unleashed Blue Velvet on an unsuspecting world in 1986. We really haven’t been the same since. “As fascinating as it is freakish,” said the New York Times’ reviewer, Elvis Mitchell, at the time. “It confirms Mr. Lynch’s status as an innovator, a superb technician and someone best not encountered in a dark alley.” Really, you’d only see the kinds of characters and the kind of plots populating Blue Velvet in your nightmares, not dark alleys. Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, and, most unforgettably, Dennis Hopper, no longer seem like actors, but like phantoms amidst the film’s plot, which leads inexorably from a human ear in a field to a beautiful, troubled nightclub singer and the psycho criminals who kidnapped her child. Yikes!