"It's a sunny, woodsy day in Lumberton: Get those chainsaws out!" The wholesome son of a hardware salesman (Kyle Maclachlan) finds a severed ear in a field and discovers a dark underworld in his Norman Rockwellian town.

A surrealistic nightmare from Director David Lynch, Blue Velvet stars Dennis Hopper as the sadistic psychopath Frank Booth. Isabella Rossellini portrays a kinky nightclub singer. The stellar supporting cast includes Laura Dern, Dean Stockwell and Brad Dourif.

"When you sleep, you don't control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I've made, a world I chose and that I have complete control over."

—David Lynch, La Revue du Cinema, February 1987

"[Blue Velvet] is an ugly, brutal, but naive movie. One cut above a snuff film. A kind of academic porn. It's interesting to me that I can never imagine things as depraved as those that occur here, and I've always thought I could get pretty low in that department . . . Hopper is an oxygen-snorting, creatively sadistic, Oedipal-punching goon . . . ['Blue Velvet'] must be his favorite song because he's always carrying around pieces of velvet and stuffing them into people's mouths, dead and alive . . . [T]he whole thing is sick in a way the world could easily do without. Lynch is a pornographic fabulist, but a real, effective one, as opposed to a faker like Brian DePalma . . . There are a goodly number of compelling moments in this movie, and it may be that Lynch will never make a completely satisfying film. This one is too premeditated to be considered merely kinky. Real phlegm noir."

—Barry Gifford, The Devil Thumbs a Ride [1988]