Let us spend some time together today over lunch; after all, it is believed to be the most important meal of the day, right? But bear in mind that this will not be an average lunch visit, as we have a really special, exciting, and scary invitation for today’s video. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another Marvelous Videos scary movie video. Prepare to keep your eyes glued to your iPads, laptop screens, or mobile phones, regardless of where you are watching.
We present to you the horror film of the day, Naked Lunch, which was released in 1991. This has to be the most ideal pairing of story directors and artists. William Burroughs, a member of the Beat Generation, is best known for his novel Naked Lunch, which he released in 1959. You are undoubtedly wondering why, after all these years, they would make a film based on this novel. You will soon discover that for yourself.
David Cronenberg, a Canadian director, directed the cinematic adaptation of Naked Lunch with tremendous delight because Burroughs has always been his favorite author. Cronenberg has wanted to develop a film adaptation of Naked Lunch since the early 1980s. In order to make it happen, he traveled to Tangiers with Burroughs and producer Jeremy Thomas in 1985, the novel’s setting and inspiration. He was eventually able to raise enough funding for his passion project after the release of Dead Ringers.
Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider star in the movie. It is a surrealist science-fiction drama co-produced by Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. It was distributed by 20th Century Fox. The film, which went on to become a cult classic, was also honored with other awards, including the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director, among others.
So, let us get started figuring out what type of lunch invitation this movie is. Sounds like a bold move.
The Book Was Banned. The Film Should Never Have Been Made Too late – Naked Lunch (1991)
You are about to enter a world that you definitely have never seen before. It will have you questioning what is real and what is unreal at several stages throughout the film. But be reminded that this is absolutely out of the ordinary. With the narrative, the adaptation, the plot, and the way the film proceeds, you are going to be stunned even if you have not read the book.
Peter Weller plays the main character of the film, William Lee who is a pest exterminator. At the beginning of the film, it looks like our exterminator seems to have run out of his supply of roach powder. William suspects that it is being stolen by somebody. Well, it is not too late until he goes home and discovers who it is.
Joan Lee, his wife, who is played by Judy Davis, is actually the one who has been injecting this insecticide into her body as a drug to get herself high. That definitely is a classic case of certain drugs gone missing. He is soon arrested by the police and when he tells them that the supposed drugs are in his possession and they are for his job, they were conducting tests on a giant beetle. Up until now, everything seems pretty simple and normal but things are about to change in the movie.
The giant beetle starts talking to William and tells him that apparently, William is a secret agent who works for him. The talking beetle then tells Lee that his wife is not actually his wife. She is apparently an agent for an organization called Interzone Incorporated, which is a free port on the North African coast. And then he orders Lee to Kill Joan and asks him to submit a report of the assassination after the job is done. He gets furious with all this and ends up killing the beetle.
Later, back at home, Lee finds his wife having sex with one of his writer friends Hank. He appears pretty okay about it for some reason. Things are definitely very bizarre in this moment. Lee then tries to do a customary William Tell routine with his wife and accidentally ends up shooting a bullet right in the middle of her head. That sure is a tragic bizarre way to die.
We can surely say that Lee has definitely been exposed to the insecticide drug and the conversation with the beetle was a hallucination indeed. He once again starts seeing things, and because now the police are looking for him for the murder of Joan Lee, he decides to run away to Interzone with a new Clark Nova typewriter that he purchased to write his supposed report. This place is apparently somewhere in a city in North Africa.
It looks like Lee is addicted to another weird drug that leaves marks on his hand and he soon finds out that his typewriter has now turned into a talking beetle, yet another new one. The movie just keeps getting more and more interesting. You will now be surprised to see the return of the dead. Lee spots a girl who looks exactly like his wife and apparently her name is Joan Frost and her husband is Tom, played by Ian Holm.
Don’t worry, she is of course not back from the dead, this girl is Joan Lee’s doppelganger. Now, his typewriter-turned insect gives him the order to seduce Joan Frost to find out what is the subject of the report. We then meet Frost’s housekeeper Fadela, who also it seems, sells some kind of a sea creature in the market. It looks like Joan might be sexually involved with Fadela, but it is unsure if all of this is also a part of Lee’s hallucination.
Lee now finds out a lot of surprising things about his dead wife. Apparently, she was sent by Fadela, who is one of the controllers at Interzone, to marry Lee. And in fact, the insect tells Lee that Joan was not even human, she was a special corps centipede. This is all shaping out to be pretty damn insane, yes.
Well, we now find out the person who is behind Interzone Incorporated, Dr. Benway. This man is running a double operation it seems and his cover is through selling a rare kind of black meat that is made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. If you are thinking this movie is all about giant beetles, insects, and centipedes, then you are quite right.
Now, remember the suspicious housekeeper Fadela, well as it turns out, Fadela actually is Dr. Benway. A man in the suit of a woman disguising everybody. Lee and Dr. Benway, at last, have an encounter where we find out that it was Dr. Benway himself who secretly recruited Lee without his knowledge at all.
It looks like he is expanding his business now, and he has sent Lee to a place called Annexia, with Joan. At the Annexian border patrol, Lee tells them that he is a writer. Naturally, they ask him to prove it, and now, it feels like we have a flashback.
Lee immediately tells Joan to do their William Tell routine. She puts an empty glass on her head, and once again, Lee misses the shot and ends up killing this doppelganger Joan as well. The film ends with Lee in weepy eyes being accepted into Annexia.
Well, this film sure knew how to leave the audience in absolute terror and strangeness. I am sure you have tons and tons of questions right now. Don’t worry, let us dig deeper into this video to find out about all the strange behavior of William Lee.
Blank-Faced Bug Killer & Mutating Mediterranean City (A Hallucinatory Existence)
You will not be surprised after knowing the story of the movie that there was a time when people did not expect that the novel could ever be made into a movie. Well, with the genius of Cronenberg, we get to watch this fantastic story right in front of us on the screens.
Even then, the film is a little different from the novel itself, but it is primarily based on it and shares a lot of similar things to the original story. Remember the place where Lee thinks that he has gone, after the death of his wife, the fictional North African region of Interzone, well it is basically a hallucinogenic version of Tangiers.
The story is based on the real-life of William Burroughs more than you can ever imagine. In fact, the whole part of Lee accidentally killing his wife in a William Tell routine has been taken directly from the real events that happened with William Burroughs. Just like Lee, Burroughs was in fact an exterminator and drug addict, who accidentally shot his wife during a drunken game of William Tell.
Joan Lee is based on his actual deceased wife Joan Vollmer, and even Lee’s writer friends Hank and Martin are based on the well-known Beat Generation poets, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs moved to a section of Tangier, Morocco, known as the International Zone and that is where our very own place of Interzone in the film actually comes from.
Towards the end of the film, Lee is seen having a sexual relationship with a guy named Kiki. This also happened with Burroughs who had a same-sex affair in Tangier with a young man named Kiki, while he was writing Naked Lunch.
The desert that is shot in the film was completely re-created on a Toronto soundstage by pouring seven hundred tons of sand onto the floor of a former munitions factory. The film’s cinematography definitely reflected the effort done by everyone.
Lee ended up driving himself to a state of drug addiction after he accidentally killed his wife and that is how he went on to write a story without ever realizing that he has written it. The whole time, according to Lee, he was living in this bizarre town with all sorts of creatures. We have a part in the film where he is visited by his friends Hank and Martin. That is when we realize that in his hallucinatory state, all the reports that Lee has been writing, is in reality a novel called Naked Lunch and not the reports for Interzone.
Interzone is a place that Lee hallucinates and so is everything that happens there. There are typewrites that have apparently turned into creatures in this place. Lee thinks that they are their guide and they are giving him orders that he needs to follow. Clark Nova, which is Lee’s typewriter is the first creature who looks like a giant beetle with letters engraved which helps Lee to write.
All the creature scenes in the film surely look gruesome and gooey. There is a lot of blood sprouting out when a typewriter is killed and also a strange white liquid that Lee is seen drinking. The second creature is a Martinelli typewriter which belonged to Tom Frost. It is apparently killed by Lee’s typewriter which definitely looks like the murder of their kind.
Tom takes away Clark Nova from Lee as revenge. Lee is then seen roaming around with a bag that according to him has broken pieces of a typewriter. This is when we are reminded that all of this is probably not real. Hank and Martin come to check up on Lee and when he shows them the bag, it is visible that there are all kinds of drugs and pills and injections inside the bag, which of course is the reality.
Now, comes our third creature who is also seen a lot in the film, which is called the Mugwumps. Interzone also has a place where every broken thing can be fixed. That is where Kiki helps Lee to get a new typewriter, which pretty much looks like the head of a Mugwump. These are actually beaked creatures of black bone with thin and sleek body structures. They have long black tongues, no liver, thin purple-blue lips and they feed on sweets and secrete an odd liquid from a weird body part on their heads.
We are introduced to this creature by Kiki, and as surprising as it may be, even Kiki had a very gruesome death. Lee met a gay Swiss gentleman named Yves Cloquet, who turned out to be a creature himself. When Kiki and Lee visited him at his house, he seduced Kiki and we saw that his body had transformed into a centipede and he poked Kiki all over and killed him.
Just before we find out the actual real identity of Dr. Benway, we see that this man has been operating from a place that is apparently full of mugwumps. And there are people who seem to be drinking that strange white liquid that pours out of an antenna-like rod coming out of the mugwump’s head.
The place that the film ends with, Annexia, also looks like it is a place from Lee’s hallucination because there is no chance that it could be real. Lee probably cries at the end because, after Joan Frost’s death, it finally hits him that he went down the road of drug addiction after his wife’s death, and nothing has been great ever since.
Why should you watch Naked Lunch?
Well, Naked Lunch sure ended up being quite a traumatizing movie with a pretty sad ending if you look at William Lee. But we can say that everything that happened with him, is what led this thrilling movie to come out in such a scary and terrifying way. has definitely done a fantastic job with this film along with the amazing star cast that he had.
The movie could not be filmed in Tangiers because of the war in Iraq, which is why it was shot in Toronto. And as a result of that, some trans-light panes were used to represent the exotic backgrounds that were seen through windows. Trans-light panes are basically large translucent enlargements of a photo.
Also, if you are wondering about what happened with William Burroughs after he actually killed his wife, well as per the Mexican laws at that period in time, he did end up doing 13 days of jail time. So, what are you waiting for, make sure to check out this movie because you probably won’t be getting any more bug powder movies any time soon?
Well guys, with that, we have come to the end of another awesome video. We hope you enjoyed watching it, as much as we enjoyed making it for you. Make sure to drop a like and hit that subscribe button on your way out. Also tell us in the comments down below, which creature design from this movie you like the most. Until then everyone, stay safe, take care, and see you in the next video. Have a great day ahead!