Wild at heart
David Lynch takes Barry Gifford's crime novel and injects his own sensibilities into proceedings to produce a road trip infused with references to Elvis and the Wizard of Oz. Nicholas Cage plays sailor ripley, a snakeskin jacket wearing rebel who gets out of jail after serving time for manslaughter. He promptly skips parole with his girlfriend Lula and heads on a roadtrip to New Orleans then beyond. Lula's mother, here the seeming personification of the wicked witch of the west, in a demented yet brilliant performance from Diane Ladd (Laura Dern's mother in real life.) She's got connections to Marcelles Santos (an excellent J E Freeman) and is worried that Sailor will spill the beans over the death of Lula's father as he used to work for Santos organisation and was present when he was killed. In a fit of desperation she asks Santos to kill Sailor and gives him permission to kill her current beau Johnnie Farragut, a private detective played by the always great Harry Dean Stanton.
Lynch and Gifford make an excellent combination. Álex de la Iglesia would later adapt another of Giffords novels Perdita Durango. While it was pretty decent its not as good a film as Lynches who adds a level of demented weirdness to proceedings that was sadly missing in Iglesia's film. From the random encounter with the squeaky voiced Freddie Jones in New Orleans, to Willlem dafoe as the utterly psychotic Bobby Peru the film is soaked in Lynchian weirdness that never overwhelms the plot or detracts from the story. Gifford would also later collaborate with Lynch on Lost Highway, a genuinely creepy noir-horror that would inspire some of the later episodes of the recent Twin peaks revival.
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