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Naked LunchIt must have been a sick genius that allowed Cronenberg to direct Naked Lunch. No director could possibly hope to adapt Burroughs' narrative-less rebel junkie classic, so Cronenberg does the next best thing, mixing the author's biography with seeping surrealism to tell the story behind the writing of the novel.
Weller plays Bill Lee/Burroughs, a professional cockroach exterminator with a mind-bending bug-powder habit. When he makes like William Tell, misses the apple and shoots wife Davis instead, he retreats into Interzone, a febrile trip of gay sex, alarming entomology and paranoia that approximates and fantasises Tangiers.
There, amid double-agent typewriters, talking anuses and a whole new world of dark conspiracy, he meets fellow artists (based on beat contemporaries Kerouac, Ginsberg and co.) who persuade him to bring his experiences to the page.
Boasting some incredible animatronic mugwumps, the film is as disturbing as a fever dream made flesh, while Burroughs' humour is not lost within the squalor.
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