David Lynch's surreal 1986 thriller Blue Velvet gets its first-ever Blu-ray release - and forms the centrepiece of the newly issued David Lynch Collection. Almost three decades on, Lynch’s film has lost absolutely none of its power to shock. The setting is nice and normal small-town America, photographed in glowing, saturated colours. The roses are red, the sky is blue and the trim picket fences brilliant white. But beneath this placid surface something is rotten - as Kyle Maclachlan’s clean-cut young teenager Jeffrey discovers after finding a severed human ear in a local field. Digging deeper, his investigation leads him into a hellish underworld where he encounters tormented nightclub singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) and mad mobster Frank Booth (a memorably OTT Dennis Hopper). Producer Dino De Laurentiis gave director David Lynch carte blanche to make the film as a favour for having helmed the sci-fi adventure Dune (1984), a wildly ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic novel that badly flopped at the box office. That’s also in the Blu-ray box set, as are Lynch’s debut film, surrealist nightmare Eraserhead (1977); haunting, mind-warping thriller Lost Highway (1997); Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), the chilling cinematic prequel to the Twin Peaks television series; and Wild at Heart (1990), Lynch’s twisted, darkly comic homage to The Wizard of Oz, which sent Nicolas Cage’s charismatic Sailor Ripley on yet another strange trip into the dark heart of modern America.
The David Lynch Collection is released on Blu-ray by Universal Pictures on Monday 4th June, and the titles in the set are also available individually on Blu-ray. The box set also includes deleted scenes, interviews and tests; plus all of David Lynch's short films and his scratchy 2002 cartoon series Dumbland.
