Reviewing Peaks – John Hurley’s One-Star Review of ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ in 1992

With the “Behind the Badge” event at the North Bend Theatre about a week away, I’m returning to another movie review of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me from 1992. This time, movie critic John Hurley from the Staten Island Advance gave Lynch’s masterpiece a one-star review in an article published on Sept. 4, 1992.

WHAT IS THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE?

Founded in 1886, the Staten Island Advance is a daily newspaper published in Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City. It’s the only daily newspaper published in Staten Island. Printer John J. Crawford and businessman James C. Kennedy first published the paper as the Richmond County Advance. The name was later changed to the Daily Advance and then to its current name. When The Advance was founded in the late 1800s, there were nine competing daily newspapers in Staten Island. Advance Publications owns the paper today and you can still find it online at silive.com.

WHO IS MOVIE CRITIC JOHN E. HURLEY?

Movie critic John E. Hurley began writing for the Advance in January 1975. He eventually began reviewing movies for the paper in the late 1970s. It appears he continued reviewing films through February 1998 with his final review being about the Michael Crichton-based film, Sphere.

Hurley reviewed David Lynch’s Blue Velvet for the Advance on Sept. 19, 1986, giving the film one-star and stating it would “leave you black and blue.”

“To his credit, director David Lynch has forged his own film signature. Unfortunately, as ‘Blue Velvet’ proves, his style primarily consists of bludgeoning the viewer with grotesque, jarring and vile imaginery [sic],” wrote Hurley in his review. “…Indeed, ‘Blue Velvet’ is so insistently vile that we stat to wonder, ‘Exactly what does this guy have against us?'”

Clearly, he didn’t enjoy the film, nor did he find Lynch’s 1990 roadtrip film, Wild at Heart, any more enjoyable.

In August 1990, Hurley gave the Palm D’Or winning film one-and-a-half stars but said it was “no way to spend a night at the movies.” In his review, he briefly mentions Twin Peaks, something that appears to have intrigued the critic.

“For the rest of us, even those who dutifully followed the intriguing Laura Palmer murder case in Lynch’s recent ‘Twin Peaks,’ watching ‘Wild at Heart’ is somewhere between baffling and painful. Either way, it’s a chore and an ugly one at that.”

I share these two reviews to set up his review of Lynch’s 1992 film released on August 28 in the United States. It should be no surprise that Hurley didn’t like it.

JOHN HURLEY: ‘TWIN PEAKS’: A WEIRD WALK WITH DAVID LYNCH | SEPT. 4, 1992

Hurley gave Lynch’s follow up to his co-created television show Twin Peaks one-star saying a “baffling plot and bizarre characters don’t add up to much.” Here is his entire review printed for archival purposes as it’s important to understand how these critical reviews contributed to the film’s original box office numbers.

“Who killed Laura Palmer? By the time viewers get through the mystifying jabberwocky of ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,’ most will be thinking, ‘Who cares?’

Yes, even the most faithful and obsessive fans of David Lynch’s TV series ‘Twin Peaks’ will have a hard time staying awake through this ponderous prequel, which follows Laura and friends through the tedious days leading up to her body being found, wrapped in plastic, on a lake shore outside this small but bizarre burg somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

The murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), a blonde 17-year-old prom queen, who was anything but the girl next door, formed the launching point for David Lynch’s initially successful TV series, which ran on ABC from April 1990 to June 1991.

The TV series wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t dull either.

By adopting the genre of a TV comedy-drama, and particularly one centered around the classic small-town murder mystery, Lynch was able to give form and structure to his instinctive eye for the sinister and surreal. It made for a dazzling combination.

Twin Peaks, we learned, was a sleepy town that never slept, filled with dark, scrumptious secrets and a populace somewhere between Peyton Place and ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’

Now set free from the constraints of the TV series, Lynch fills the screen with a weird and wild assortment of characters and images. But weirder in this case certainly doesn’t mean better.

‘Fire Walk With Me’ is a grim, nasty and incoherent muddle that buffets us with indecipherable images and dream sequences, with-out the faintest suggestion that they add up to anything but pure hokum. The Twin Peaks we find in this feature film is also sadly de-populated.

Gone, in fact, are most of the most interesting, eccentric characters — sheriff Michael Ontkean, conniving bigwig Piper Laurie, sultry schoolgirl Sherilyn Fenn —who made the TV series so watchable.

‘Fire Walk With Me’ unfortunately, concentrates almost exclusively on Laura Palmed’ (Sheryl Lee), and her immediate associates, real or imagined. Among other things, we learn that Laura was “heavily into coke” and given to wandering over to the local roadside tavern, where she’d take money from local patrons in exchange for sexual favors.

Laura was also haunted by a malevolent figure she called Bob, a bearded, long-haired stranger who she claims had been visiting her nocturnally since she was 12.

Laura is also increasingly wary of her creepy father Leland (Ray Wise), who’s not above fooling around himself, but has a prurient fetish about the cleanliness of Laura’s hands.

Along the way, the viewer also has brief but no less baffling en-counters with those familiar favorites, the Log Lady, (Catherine E. Coulson), a backwoods seer who perpetually carries a log, and that dancing little gnome with reverb in his voice, called the Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson), still holed up in the mysterious Red Room, where jabberwocky is the mother tongue.

David Bowie appears briefly as a strange FBI informer: Lynch himself appears as a hard-of-hearing FBI supervisor. A young-ster roams through the film wear-ing a Pinocchio-style mask. We even get a white horse appearing briefly in the Palmer living room. Did Trigger kill Laura Palmer, we wonder?

There are some other notice-able differences between the original mini-series and this feature. First, there was a tongue-in-cheek quality to those macabre goings-on in the original series, especially in Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI Agent Dale Cooper, a mystic and avid dreamer who could still revel in a good cup of coffee.

‘Fire Walk With Me,’ however, is as humorless and tiresome as its title suggests. Cooper appears only briefly, for one thing, and every other character seems to spend the entire film either shrieking or sobbing.

Yes, we will eventually learn the killer’s identity, but by then, those not fortunate enough to be snoring soundly will probably have a migraine the size of Mount Rushmore.

Ambiguity and obliqueness in film are welcome, as long as the viewer is given some shred of evidence that somewhere, some-how, there is a unifying meaning to the mumbo jumbo.

Lynch, who studied to be a painter as a young man, has a knack for drawing startling visual pictures. The murder sequence especially is an unflinching tour de force of light and darkness, laughter and terror. But most of ‘Fire Walk With Me’ is all smoke and mirrors, revealing nothing but the chaos and curious disorder of Lynch’s mind. Rated R, for nudity and via lence, 2 hrs. 15 mins.”

The newspaper published two publicity images from the film to accompany Hurley’s review. The first shows Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in the Red Room as discussed in this Twin Peaks Blog article. This photo was taken by the late on-set photographer Lorey Sebastian.

Sebastian also took the second publicity photo of James Hurley (James Marshall) and Laura outside her home in Twin Peaks.

The film was in theatres for only handful of weeks, especially with critical reviews like Hurley’s. It would take decades before many re-evaluated Lynch’s prequel to Twin Peaks to now consider it one of his best films.