The film, Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch is like nothing that has reached the big screen  before with disturbing themes of violent and controlling BDSM sex. The story follows Jefferey, a college student who is back home because his father is in the hospital, who finds a human ear in a field and teams up with Sandy, a high school senior, to try to find out who the ear belonged to. He ends up hiding in Dorothy’s closet and witnesses a crazy man named Frank taking advantage of her and beating her because he has her child taken hostage. The film explores the dark culture that lies beneath white picket fences that is the suburban neighborhood.

The plot of the film is a simple love story, but Lynch amplifies the story by including the strong violent and sexual themes that are so blatant within the film. In one scene near the beginning of the film, it shows Frank coming over to Dorothy’s house and he expects her to already have the candles lit and a bourbon in his hand before he starts to have sex with her. He then inhales from his  dentist grade anesthesia and looses all inhibitions. The film doesn’t hide anything from showing Frank go crazy over Dorothy’s body. This scene seems like it never should have happened, but it works so well with the film. The film as a whole has aged very well and works with our culture today that doesn’t hold anything back.

Roger Ebert did not take to the film at all in his 1986 review, lashing out on the film for being too disturbing for its own good. The film focuses on the disturbing nature of the bondage sex world with themes too violent for the public. Reviews that are more recent are much more favorable to Blue Velvet. A 2001 review by Empire hails the film for its disturbing nature and says that it was a break-through film for the independent sector, filled with vision and voice. It also states that Blue Velvet could be argued to be the best movie coming out of the 1980s.

Comparing Blue Velvet to the Chinese cop buddy film, Hard Boiled, is not an easy task. Whereas Blue Velvet is a completely unconventional film that fits into genre patterns, Hard Boiled is a conventional film that was made to get viewers into the seats and set the standards for how action  sequences were performed from its time on. These two films are a lot alike, because neither of them lean on the story for the success of the film, but use shock and awe to attract viewers. Blue Velvet does it through the ultra disturbing themes and Hard Boiled does it through the out of this world action sequences that take place on screen.

Hard Boiled was directed by John Woo in Hong Kong during the middle of a major crime wave. A retrospective of Woo’s films by Anthony Leong says, “Woo sought to provide his audience with a law enforcement officer who would stand up to the rising crime and pre-reunification jitters.” This was Woo’s last film in Hong Kong before he moved to Hollywood to try to take on American Cinema, and he wanted to leave his hometown viewers with something that would touch their emotions and leave a trace in their hearts.

It doesn’t take long for Hard Boiled to get into the action, and the whole movie is a series of action sequences that takes small breaks to advance the plot further. Woo created a type of action sequence that has been reproduced a countless number of times in films that we are all familiar with such as Die Hard. There are heavy camera tracking techniques used to follow the heroes through the mayhem, and a very minimal amount of slow motion that does a nice job of increasing the suspense and making the scenes easier to follow.  The main action though wasn’t added from heavy editing because Woo is a believer in letting the action come alive on set and then transitioning to the screen. This is easy to see in the last long action sequence of the film where the heroes, Tequila and Alan, are shooting their way through a hoard of bad guys in the hospital that is about to explode. The most memorable part of the sequence is when Tequila holds a small baby while shooting enemies and trying to escape the hospital. The baby saves the day when it pees on Tequila’s leg and extinguishes the fire that has engulfed him. The scene is complete madness, but Woo found a way to make it work and become the most memorable part of the film.

Critics have raved about Hard Boiled from the beginning and through the years, never changing their opinion or questioning Woo’s abilities. One popular article by Scott Tobias credits Woo for creating the archetype that action movies use today and say that his scenes, “have now simply become the accepted language of action movies.”

Hard Boiled helped set the framework for its genre while Blue Velvet took patterns and idea that worked in past films and successfully incorporates them. There are strong parallels to other films such as Out of the Past. An expert from the book, The Strange World of Blue Velvet: Conventions, Subversions, and the Representation of Women, says, “It is hard to believe that David Lynch did not intend to call to the ways in which Blue Velvet self-consciously inserts itself into film history and genre patterns.” Lynch found a way for his film to fit seamlessly into the genre while Woo found a way to redefine his genre. Critics of both directors have said that the only thing wrong with each film is that it was outdone in the future. Blue Velvet was outdone by Lynch’s later work, while Hard Boiled was outdone by more recent action movies that borrowed from Woo’s archetype.

Both films used marketing techniques to attract viewers by showing the unique side to the chaos shown in the separate films. The trailer and posters for Blue Velvet highlight the disturbing nature by showing scenes and pictures of extreme bondage sex to try to pique the viewers’ curiosity about this film. It entices a dark lifestyle that so many people are curious about. The film tries something new to attract audiences, rather than the strategy for so many blockbusters at the time that advertised for what they knew would make money in the box office, David Lynch offers the audience a terrifying story that he knew they needed, but the audience did not. The posters and trailers for Hard Boiled highlighted on the action of the film and by doing so it ran the strategy that was known to get audiences to the theaters. The trailer is entirely composed of action with no dialogue at all, and the posters attract interest by hinting at the action scene with Tequila holding the baby.

The two films cost roughly about the same to produce, with Blue Velvet costing $6 million and Hard Boiled costing around $4.5 million USD, but they produced earnings in a drastically different manner. Blue Velvet just barley covered its cost by earning $7 million because it was such a strange concept for viewers. Hard Boiled earned over $19 million USD in China alone. Hard Boiled did much better in North America because it appealed to the Hollywood style that Woo was yearning for.

Both of these films have aged very well because the themes that they portray hold true today, and the way that both directors created key scenes were well ahead of their time. Although both films were used more to grab the audiences’ excitement and blow them away instead of lean on a deep plot, they will both be a part of history and memorable experiences to viewers everywhere.