Load of rubbish!!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

David Lynch brings us an unsettling vision of a bed-wetting boy, his abusive parents, and the grandmother that he grows from a seed. The film, which toggles between live action and animation (reminiscent of Terry Gilliam), is dark, organic and surreal, especially when the 'grandmother seed' germinates into a spiky, phallic mushroom, growing from a pile of dirt centered on an old-fashioned bed. Reversing normal progression, the grandmother is pulled from the womb, fully dressed, by the child, who then engages in revenge fantasies against his parents following an incredibly unappetizing dinner scene. Best watched at night, in the dark for full effect, "The Grandmother" is a series of strange, and sometimes unpleasant, images strung together by the barest of stories. Not for all tastes but a must for fans of Lynch or of experimental filmmaking in general. My ranking is based on neither really liking nor really disliking the film, but probably not really 'getting it' either. Maybe you will...

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.

The Grandmother, like other surreal short films (and, of course, like the rest of Lynch's work), is not that concerned with logic, at least in conventional terms. If there is anything at all conventional about the the film is that it has at its core that small statement on youth and innocence that can be interpreted a hundred ways to Sunday- if you're lonely and dejected you'll look for companionship. It's just that in this case the conventional wisdom of finding someone at the playground or at school is bypassed- here the boy, in isolation from his barking, mad parents, plants and grows a grandmother to spend time with. But is it all as it should be? Lynch, much as he did with Eraserhead, leaves so much up to interpretation that on a first viewing it's almost not even necessary to find something coherent in what goes on. But in that sense, of course, many will likely be befuddled, disturbed, and maybe even offended at the lack of typical cohesion from start to finish.What it does provide, however, is a kind of cinema experience that has to be felt, seen, heard, taken in as cinema on the technical and artistic side of things always goes. Even when I didn't know what was "going on" with the boy and his grandmother and parents, I didn't mind as long as I knew Lynch was doing something with the camera or lighting or editing or music or animation or all of the above to make it a visceral experience. Yes, there are some tedious moments here and there (which, even in being a 35 minute short film, are possibly more so than the ones in Eraserhead), yes the first two to three minutes takes some time to adjust to, and yes there ending is left about as ambiguous as can be. But it shook me up all the same, like the best parts of 90's music videos. Any time, for example, that Lynch used a sort of stop-motion technique during the live action I was thrilled in a way. The animated sequences have a crude quality that could only be matched by Gilliam's Python animations. And the actors (or maybe just pieces) in Lynch's macabre framing and set ups and pay off seem all perfect for the parts.If you're already a fan coming on to this DVD set of Lynch short films, this may or may not come as the most eccentric, wonderfully outrageous of the lot of them; it could also be for some the most 'huh' of all of the films as it is the longest and with the most density in the surrealism. It is the mark, interested in it or not, of an artist leaving something out for a good look and soak into what it is or could be or is lacking. Grade: A

Long-time Lynch collaborator Jack Nance once said that watching The Grandmother was like spending half an hour in the electric chair. Mixing live action (both colour and black & white) with animation, along with a dark & unsettling soundscape created by Alan Splet (still Lynch's sound designer today, three decades later), the film is an intensely disturbing experience.The Grandmother deals with the story of a boy, abused by his brutal, animal-like parents, who grows himself a kindly grandmother in the attic. Although it does suffer from a certain 'student film' feeling, this half-hour short is a must-see for all fans of David Lynch, particularly those who admire the stark & surreal world of Eraserhead. One can definitely see the genesis of Lynch's next film within it.