Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

It begins with an axe crashing into a TV set: sparks fly, a scream is heard, and the symbolism is brutally obvious - forget everything you thought you knew about the quirky, wacky, cosy world of ‘Twin Peaks', cos Daddy's home and he's pissed off. Like many of the show's hardcore fans, David Lynch was disillusioned with what ‘Twin Peaks' had become: from a groundbreaking, excoriating peek into America's small-town underbelly to a cute parade of oddball soap-operatics in under two years. The big screen version gave him licence to bring it all back to basics, and he grabbed it with both hands: even in Lynch-land, with all its ear-severing, head-exploding, exploitation and rough sex, there's nothing so dark and demented as ‘Fire Walk With Me', the simplest, strangest, saddest and arguably greatest of all his films. The critics sneered, the fans balked and the public stayed away in droves. It's their loss: this was a beautiful new kind of madness, terrifying, exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure.