SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Cortechba Overrated

Tetrady not as good as all the hype

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Michael Neumann Before directing his breakthrough cult classic 'Eraserhead' David Lynch made this thirty-minute art school oddity, sketching on a smaller canvas the same nightmares that would later haunt his feature films. Using a raw, experimental style combining exaggerated live action with naive animation, Lynch flaunts his preoccupation with psychosexual imagery and symbolism, showing all the creative freedom (and many of the pretensions) of an artist discovering his true medium. Yes, the film does have a plot, but it's not really about a boy and his grandmother, any more than 'Eraserhead' was about a man and his baby. Shown on the same program (when I saw it, at the Red Vic Theatre on Haight Street in San Francisco) was the eight-minute animated 'Alphabet', another early Lynch project, and definitely not the sort of pre-school primer taught on Sesame Street. Viewers familiar with his more recent work will know exactly what to expect.

Dan Keene I first saw this on the "Short Films of David Lynch" DVD a while back, and I was just as fascinated with this early effort as I was with his later work. In fact, I think this was the point that David Lynch's style became more defined in the direction of dark surrealism that only he can devise. Others may try the same kind of style, and some do very well indeed, but this film is indeed a signature that would leave a mark on the rest of his career. The imagery and atmosphere in the setting has a kind of nightmarish ambiance about it; not the kind of "scary" that makes you jump, but more like a domesticated hell. And the animated sequences just might pop up in your memory as you try to go to sleep for the night. Of course I realize that David Lynch might be an acquired taste, but anyone who has a knack for "getting that weird feeling" from watching a movie, then I suggest this short classic (classic in my book anyway).

Ben Parker One of the most disturbing things i've ever seen. The actors in this film, David Lynch's third film technically, but his first narrative film, were never in any other movies - one of them, Father, died a few years ago - it is as if they exist only in the frightening nightmare world of this boy's life, which consists of two dog-like parents who only bark at him with unintelligible sounds, and beat him and rub his face in the urine when he wets the bed, like a puppy. The subject of the film (and if i don't tell you this, it'll make so little sense to you, because its never properly explained in the film) is the boy has no love from his parents, and no grandmother to give him respite from them and comfort him, so he grows one in the attic.It is a horrifying, brilliant film, which creates an imaginative world very successfully - albeit one you desparately want to escape from as soon as possible, but it does this well at least.The Lynchian oeuvre is almost fully formed here, right from the start. Little dialogue, atmospheric soundtrack of constant sound effects which you find in Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr; impressionistic approach to performance and makeup/costume and sets; the quality of estrangement in the direction, and most importantly there is the union of terrible, twisted darkness and optimistic naivety (developed to the full in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr).For Lynch fans, this is a thing to see. Unlike Six Men Getting Sick or The Amputee, this is not just an experiment or an early film of a Director that ruins your impression of them, it stands on its own, irrespective of Lynch's subsequent work (though it also sets the tone for his subsequent narrative work) as a great surrealist/impressionist narrative short.

jbels The Grandmother is a good companion piece to Eraserhead (I remember when they used to show this on a double bill with Alphabet). Robert Chadwick as the dog/father looks much younger than his actual age. The boundaries broken with the boy in this film are very disturbing. And it is heartbreaking to see a child have to "grow" a comforting parental figure. Great film.