Lynch calls his film "a violent comedy."Meeting with Maclean's in Los Angeles, the 44-year-old director said with quiet understatement, "Some of the scenes are shocking-it's a pretty shocking world." Added Lynch: "Wild at Heart is not for everybody. I have been telling my mother not to go anywhere near it."

According to the movie's co-producer,Monty Montgomery, 75 per cent of audience members at Los Angeles test screenings rated the film as "excellent," but the same number said that they would not recommend it to their friends. Concluded Montgomery: "It was like having a good time at a strip joint, but being too embarrassed to tell people about it."

Written by Lynch and based on the manuscript of a 1990 novel by American author Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart is a tale of two southern lovers, Sailor and Lula, on the run from a gang of creepy killers. As Sailor, Nicholas Cage plays the sunstruck flip side of the dopey romantic he portrayed in Moonstruck (1987). He talks (and sings) like a campy reincarnation of Elvis Presley. He wears a snakeskin jacket that he earnestly describes as "a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom." He addresses his sultry girlfriend as "Peanut." Cage plays Sailor as pure caricature, unrealistic but consistently funny. As Lula, Laura Dern manages a more impressive feat, by filling out an equally outrageous stereotype with emotional conviction. Dern, who played a nice suburban girl in Blue Velvet, is transformed into a ravishing sexpot with a dirty drawl and lines like "You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt." But in Wild at Heart, not all that sizzles is sex. Lula is haunted by memories of a kerosene fire that killed her father. Images of conflagration fill the screen at measured intervals throughout the movie.

And as the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that the movie's violent intrigue can be traced back to a sinister family secret about the cause of the blaze. The movie opens with a scene of excruciating violence as Sailor uses his bare hands to kill a man who comes after him with a knife. Two years later, after serving a manslaughter sentence, Sailor is out on parole and back in Lula's arms. But Lula's mother, Marietta-a shrill harridan portrayed by Dern's real-life mother, Diane Ladd-is determined to put an end to their romance. She orders her boyfriend, Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton), to track them down. And while Sailor and Lula drive west through the Deep South, hoping to find the end of the rainbow in California, Marietta arranges for a mobster named Santos (J. E. Freemam) to put out a contract on Sailor's life-a mission that is relayed through a cult-like succession of ghoulish criminals.

Rarely have so many depraved characters been crammed into a single movie. Assembled like freaks under a carnival tent, they include a drug lord named Mr. Reindeer (Morgan Sheppard), who keeps a harem of barebreasted slave girls; a deranged cousin from Lula's past (Crispin Glover), who keeps cockroaches in his underwear; a psychopath with a hideous grin named Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe); and a gun moll with yellow hair and a simian brow (Isabella Rossellini).

A black angel in a bolo tie, Dafoe delivers the movie's most exquisite performance, highlighted by an unforgivably sick gag involving sexual violence. Rossellini, the director's girlfriend-who was dragged naked through the mud in Blue Velvet-retains her dignity in an aloof cameo. In his new movie, Lynch reserves the degradation for Ladd, whose over-the-top performance is painful to watch.