Naked LunchMovies like Naked Lunch
- Key Features:
- Drug use, Surrealism, Existentialism, Paranoia, Counterculture, Writers journey, Hallucinations, Psychological thriller, Avant-garde, Adaptation, Cult classic, Cerebral
- Tone:
- surreal, cynical, stylized
- Target Audience:
- Fans of surreal and experimental films, Viewers interested in psychological thrillers, Those familiar with Beat Generation literature, Cult film enthusiasts
- Emotional Arc:
- Confusion → Delirium → Revelation
Naked Lunch

Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.
Naked Lunch
When a man's best friend is killed on the streets of New York, he transforms into a violent killer, turning New York into a war zone.

A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

An earthquake releases a strain of mutant cockroaches with the ability to start fires, which proceed to cause destructive chaos in a small town. The studies carried out by scientist James Parmiter, however, reveal an intent with much more far-reaching consequences.

Austin, Texas, is an Eden for the young and unambitious, from the enthusiastically eccentric to the dangerously apathetic. Here, the nobly lazy can eschew responsibility in favor of nursing their esoteric obsessions. The locals include a backseat philosopher who passionately expounds on his dream theories to a seemingly comatose cabbie, a young woman who tries to hawk Madonna's Pap test to anyone who will listen and a kindly old anarchist looking for recruits.

Strike is a young city drug pusher under the tutelage of drug lord Rodney Little. When a night manager at a fast-food restaurant is found with four bullets in his body, Strike’s older brother turns himself in as the killer. Detective Rocco Klein doesn’t buy the story, however, setting out to find the truth, and it seems that all the fingers point toward Strike & Rodney.

In Oklahoma, Agnes, a lonely waitress living in an isolated and dilapidated roadside motel, meets Peter, a quiet and mysterious man with whom she establishes a peculiar relationship.

It's 1983, and hopeless junkie Dick gets an unwelcome visit from the past - his seriously sleazy former cellmate, Bug, to be precise. Bug requires a crash course in the 80s: different music, different drugs, and machines in walls that dispense money. The latter development gives Dick an idea.

Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo drive a red convertible across the Mojave desert to Las Vegas with a suitcase full of drugs to cover a motorcycle race. As their consumption of drugs increases at an alarming rate, the stoned duo trash their hotel room and fear legal repercussions. Duke begins to drive back to L.A., but after an odd run-in with a cop, he returns to Sin City and continues his wild drug binge.

On behalf of "oppressed bugs everywhere," an inventive ant named Flik hires a troupe of warrior bugs to defend his bustling colony from a horde of freeloading grasshoppers led by the evil-minded Hopper.

When Seth Brundle makes a huge scientific and technological breakthrough in teleportation, he decides to test it on himself. Unbeknownst to him, a common housefly manages to get inside the device and the two become one.

A formal dinner party starts out normally enough, but after the bourgeois group retire to the host’s music room, they inexplicably find themselves unable to leave.

A large spider from the jungles of South America is accidentally transported in a crate with a dead body to America where it mates with a local spider. Soon after, the residents of a small California town disappear as the result of spider bites from the deadly spider offspring. It's up to a couple of doctors with the help of an insect exterminator to annihilate these eight legged freaks.

Roberto, a drummer in a rock band, keeps receiving weird phone calls and being followed by a mysterious man. One night he manages to catch up with his persecutor and tries to get him to talk but in the ensuing struggle he accidentally stabs him. He runs away, but he understands his troubles have just begun when the following day he receives an envelope with photos of him killing the man. Someone is killing all his friends and trying to frame him for the murders.

Four stories intersect in this violent film parody. Exterminators dress as hit men and try to protect the wife of their boss, Montello. Meanwhile, the strippers at Montello's strip club, dressed as nuns, attempt to rob him. Tag-team wrestlers steal Montello's briefcase, thinking its contents are valuable. Finally, Bumpkin, running to deliver a script, loses a lot of the pages.

Alex is a lonely accountant whose one act of rage results in her being sentenced to court-ordered therapy. There she meets Stella, the owner of a small extermination business who uses her car as a weapon, and Nikki, a dental technician with the face of an angel and the mind of a sociopath. Together these women form their own "silent revolution", wreaking havoc on the abusive men in their lives.

In 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering is drawn inexorably to Nazism.

A collection of intersecting short stories set in early 1980s Los Angeles, depicts a week in the lives of an assortment of socially alienated, mainly well-off characters who numb their sense of emptiness with casual sex, violence, and drugs.

In a near-future Britain, young Alexander DeLarge and his pals get their kicks beating and raping anyone they please. When not destroying the lives of others, Alex swoons to the music of Beethoven. The state, eager to crack down on juvenile crime, gives an incarcerated Alex the option to undergo an invasive procedure that'll rob him of all personal agency. In a time when conscience is a commodity, can Alex change his tune?

A young drifter, struggling to makes ends meet, accepts a job to kill a prominent accountant. When he isn't paid for the hit, revenge is now his path.

A poet falls in love with an art student, who gravitates to his bohemian lifestyle — and his love of heroin. Hooked as much on one another as they are on the drug, their relationship alternates between states of oblivion, self-destruction, and despair.

As the president of a trashy TV channel, Max Renn is desperate for new programming to attract viewers. When he happens upon "Videodrome," a TV show dedicated to gratuitous torture and punishment, Max sees a potential hit and broadcasts the show on his channel. However, after his girlfriend auditions for the show and never returns, Max investigates the truth behind Videodrome and discovers that the graphic violence may not be as fake as he thought.

A nice guy has just moved to New York and discovers that he must share his run-down apartment with a couple thousand singing, dancing cockroaches.

A mysterious exterminator falls in love with two women who live in a distinctive wine-producing region in Spain.

A newly dead New England couple seeks help from a deranged demon exorcist to scare an affluent New York family out of their home.

A lone drifter stumbles upon a unique pair of sunglasses that reveal aliens are systematically gaining control of the Earth by masquerading as humans and lulling the public into submission.

The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child.

An unemployed Brit vents his rage on unsuspecting strangers as he embarks on a nocturnal London odyssey.

When the bumbling Lieutenant Frank Drebin investigates events following the shooting of his partner, he stumbles upon an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II.

An alien creature invades New York's punk subculture in its search for an opiate released by the brain during an orgasm.

A college freshman returns to Los Angeles for Christmas at his ex-girlfriend's request, but discovers that his former best friend has an out-of-control drug habit.

A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.

In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.

A computer hacker's goal to discover the reason for human existence continually finds his work interrupted thanks to the Management; this time, they send a teenager and lusty love interest to distract him.

Sal Paradise is a young writer whose life is shaken and ultimately redefined by the arrival of Dean Moriarty, a free-spirited, fearless, fast talking Westerner and his girl, Marylou. Traveling cross-country, Sal and Dean venture out on a personal quest for freedom from the conformity and conservatism engulfing them in search of the unknown, themselves, and the pursuit of “it” -- the pure essence of experience.

People are dying mysteriously and gruesomely, and nobody has a clue what the cause is. Only health worker Mike Brady has a possible solution, but his theory of killer slugs is laughed at by the authorities. Only when the body count begins to rise and a slug expert from England begins snooping around does it begin to look like Mike had the right idea after all.

A scientist taints his mother's scientific experiment with his own drug that transforms pain into a pleasurable experience. Unfortunately for the three women involved in the experiment, the drug works a little bit too well.

Jordan White and Amy Blue, two troubled teens, pick up an adolescent drifter, Xavier Red. Together, the threesome embarks on a sex- and violence-filled journey through a United States of psychos and quickie marts.

After being stung by a giant insect, Cooper learns that these bugs are attacking the whole city. He joins forces with the survivors, in order to find a way to counter-attack.

After the insane General Jack D. Ripper initiates a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, a war room full of politicians, generals and a Russian diplomat all frantically try to stop it.

A US government germ warfare lab has had an accident. The first theory is that one of the germs has been released and killed several scientists. The big fear is that a more virulent strain, named The Satan Bug because all life can be killed off by it should it escape, may have been stolen.

After botching his latest assignment, a third-ranked Japanese hit man becomes the target of another assassin.

Poet/lecturer Charles Serking awakens from his alcoholic haze long enough to take a bus back to L.A. and plunge into an orgy of drink and sexual depravity.

A rash of bizarre murders in New York City seems to point to a group of grotesquely deformed vagrants living in the sewers. A courageous policeman, a photojournalist and his girlfriend, and a nutty bum, who seems to know a lot about the creatures, band together to try and determine what the creatures are and how to stop them.

Suburbanite Ron is spoiled, young and not overly worried about the marijuana charges leveled against him. But, after being made out to be a drug dealer, he faces a five-year jail sentence in San Quentin State Prison. Physically frail and unaccustomed to his rough surroundings, Ron is primed to fall victim to sexual predators and bullying guards – that is, until he's befriended by Earl, a veteran inmate who finds meaning in protecting the vulnerable new kid.

George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

A petty criminal fakes insanity to serve his sentence in a mental ward rather than prison. He soon finds himself as a leader to the other patients—and an enemy to the cruel, domineering nurse who runs the ward.

Three handicapped losers who form a band ask famous writer Dries to be their drummer. He joins the band and starts manipulating them.

An undercover cop in a not-too-distant future becomes involved with a dangerous new drug and begins to lose his own identity as a result.

A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgängers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.

The residents of San Francisco are becoming drone-like shadows of their former selves, and as the phenomenon spreads, two Department of Health workers uncover the horrifying truth.

Capable of making bio-mechanical weapons out of human flesh, alien parasites grotesquely invade the Earth, turning their hosts into maniacal killers who seek and destroy each other to the bloody death! And yes, it s also a human love story, even though the budding romantics are infested with slimy, tumor-like globules.

Set in the future, the story follows a young soldier named Johnny Rico and his exploits in the Mobile Infantry. Rico's military career progresses from recruit to non-commissioned officer and finally to officer against the backdrop of an interstellar war between mankind and an arachnoid species known as "the Bugs."

When an explosion at a top-secret government lab injures an elderly janitor, no one could have expected the terrifying results. Exposure to mysterious chemicals causes him to undergo a bizarre transformation. He is slowly... incredibly... growing younger every day. Now, a ruthless CIA assassin will stop at nothing to take him prisoner and turn him into a government guinea pig. With his future on the line, the janitor goes on the run with his wife and a feisty female agent. All the while, he continues to transform... into a being with powers that are as deadly as they are unimaginable.

Sometime in the future, mankind has depleted all energy and fuel sources, however they have engineered a way to use human excrement as fuel. To reward production, the government hands out extremely addictive, popsicle-like "Juicybars", which in turn also act as a laxative. Aachi and Ssipak are street hoodlums who struggle to survive by trading these bars in the black market.

With his partner, a celebrity performance artist publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. An investigator from the National Organ Registry obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed... Their mission — to use the artist's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.

A simple man is turned into a genius through the application of computer science.

Tom Ripley, an American who deals in forged art, is slighted at an auction in Hamburg by picture framer Jonathan Zimmerman. When Ripley is asked by gangster Raoul Minot to kill a rival, he suggests Zimmerman, and the two, exploiting Zimmerman's terminal illness, coerce him into being a hitman.

New York gangster Ben 'Bugsy' Siegel takes a brief business trip to Los Angeles. A sharp-dressing womanizer with a foul temper, Siegel doesn't hesitate to kill or maim anyone crossing him. In L.A. the life, the movies, and most of all strong-willed Virginia Hill detain him while his family wait back home. Then a trip to a run-down gambling joint at a spot in the desert known as Las Vegas gives him his big idea.

In a violent, near-apocalyptic Detroit, evil corporation Omni Consumer Products wins a contract from the city government to privatize the police force. To test their crime-eradicating cyborgs, the company leads street cop Alex Murphy into an armed confrontation with crime lord Boddicker so they can use his body to support their untested RoboCop prototype. But when RoboCop learns of the company's nefarious plans, he turns on his masters.

Inspired by the fictional Dr. Heiter, disturbed loner Martin dreams of creating a 12-person centipede and sets out to realize his sick fantasy.

After Dick Harper loses his job at Globodyne in an Enron-esque collapse, he and his wife, Jane, turn to crime in order to handle the massive debt they now face. Two intelligent people, Dick and Jane actually get pretty good at robbing people and even enjoy it -- but they have second thoughts when they're reminded that crime can hurt innocent people. When the couple hears that Globodyne boss Jack McCallister actually swindled the company, they plot revenge.

The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island residents are shattered when their addictions run deep.

An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise.

Fritz, now married and with a son, is desperate to escape from the domestic hell he now finds himself in. Lighting up a joint, he begins to dream about his eight other lives, hoping to find one that will provide a pleasant distraction.

In Hollywood, the lives of a successful film producer, his wife, a police detective and a surveillance agent intersect after a botched abduction.

After witnessing a mysterious woman brutally slay a homemaker, prostitute Liz Blake finds herself trapped in a dangerous situation. While the police thinks she is the murderer, the real killer is intent on silencing her only witness.

In the future, the government maintains control of public opinion by outlawing literature and maintaining a group of enforcers, known as “firemen,” to perform the necessary book burnings. Fireman Montag begins to question the morality of his vocation…

When the residents of a luxury apartment complex outside Montreal are infiltrated by parasites and transformed into violent, sex-crazed maniacs, it's up to Dr. Roger St. Luc to contain the outbreak from spreading to the city.

After losing their academic posts at a prestigious university, a team of parapsychologists goes into business as proton-pack-toting "ghostbusters" who exterminate ghouls, hobgoblins and supernatural pests of all stripes. An ad campaign pays off when a knockout cellist hires the squad to purge her swanky digs of demons that appear to be living in her refrigerator.

An alien starship crashes in a swamp in a U.S. National Park. Some mosquitos begin to feed from the alien's corpses, causing them to grow to the size of a vulture. These mutant insects became very agressive, killing every human being they find. Will the few survivors fight successfully against this nightmare...?

An outcast teenager, Pauline, practices surgical skills and harbors increasingly violent psychosexual fantasies.

Fast-talking Latino con artist Pestario "Pest" Vargas is the target of Scottish mobsters to whom he owes a considerable debt. Willing to do anything to raise money and avoid severe injury or death, Vargas agrees to a very unusual job -- he will be transported to a remote island and hunted by Gustav Shank, a racist German executive. If he can survive a full day and night, Vargas gets $50,000 and will be set free. Is he wily enough to elude Shank?

The story of Peter McGowan, a chain-smoking, impotent, insomniac playwright who lives in Los Angeles. Once very successful, he is now in the tenth year of a decade-long string of production failures. He finds himself bonding with a new neighbor's lonely young daughter who has mild cerebral palsy; and during one of his middle-of-the-night strolls, he encounters his oddball doppelgänger.

Ace assassin Frank Kitchen is double crossed by gangsters and falls into the hands of rogue surgeon known as The Doctor who turns him into a woman. The hitman, now a hitwoman, sets out for revenge, aided by a nurse named Johnnie who also has secrets.

At a party, someone goes insane and murders three women. Falsely accused of the brutal killings, Jerry is on the run. More bizarre homicides continue with alarming frequency all over town. Trying to clear his name, Jerry discovers the shocking truth...people are losing their hair and turning into violent psychopaths and the connection may be some LSD all the murderers took a decade before.

Heroin addict Mark Renton stumbles through bad ideas and sobriety attempts with his unreliable friends --Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Tommy. He also has an underage girlfriend, Diane, along for the ride. After cleaning up and moving from Edinburgh to London, Mark finds he can't escape the life he left behind as Begbie and Sick Boy come knocking.

The life of Danny Wright, a salesman forever on the road, veers into dangerous and surreal territory when he wanders into a Mexican bar and meets a mysterious stranger, Julian, who's very likely a hit man. Their meeting sets off a chain of events that will change their lives forever, as Wright is suddenly thrust into a far-from-mundane existence that he takes to surprisingly well … once he gets acclimated to it.

A U.S Customs official uncovers a massive money laundering scheme involving Pablo Escobar.

After a man with extraordinary, and frighteningly destructive, telepathic abilities is nabbed by agents from a mysterious rogue corporation, he discovers he is far from the only possessor of such strange powers. Some of the other “scanners” have their minds set on world domination, while others are trying to stop them.

A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.

As a result of nuclear testing, gigantic, ferocious mutant ants appear in the American desert southwest, and a father-daughter team of entomologists join forces with the state police officer who first discovers their existence, an FBI agent and, eventually, the US Army to eradicate the menace, before it spreads across the continent — and the world.

With the space program attempting to travel to Mars, 21st century scientists were tasked with warming up the planet so that humans could survive on its surface. They came up with an efficient and cost effective plan of sending cockroaches and mold to the surface so that the mold would absorb the sunlight and the insect corpses would serve as a food source for the mold. It is now the year 2577 and the first manned ship to Mars has landed on the planet and the six crew members are ready for their mission. But what they find are giant mutated humanoid cockroaches with incredible physical strength. The crew members are easily wiped out, but not before sending a transmission back to Earth. Now, humanity will send elite warriors to exterminate the mutated bugs and claim back Mars.

A dentist finds himself a murder suspect after a sexy patient seduces him into prescribing her drugs.

Seymour Krelborn is a nerdy orphan working at Mushnik's; a flower shop in urban Skid Row. He harbors a crush on fellow co-worker, Audrey Fulquard, and is berated by Mr. Mushnik daily. One day, Seymour finds a very mysterious unidentified plant which he calls Audrey II. The plant seems to have a craving for blood and soon begins to sing for it’s supper.

A serial killer whose mother was a prostitute starts killing streetwalkers as a way of paying back his mother for her abuse.

First-time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.

When a giant alien spider escapes from a military lab and rampages across the city of Los Angeles, it is up to one clever exterminator and his security guard sidekick to kill the creature before the entire city is destroyed.

Washington, D.C. psychologist Carol Bennell and her colleague Dr. Ben Driscoll are the only two people on Earth who are aware of an epidemic running rampant through the city. They discover an alien virus aboard a crashed space shuttle that transforms anyone who comes into contact with it into unfeeling drones while they sleep. Carol realizes her son holds the key to stopping the spread of the plague and she races to find him before it is too late.

After a successful deployment of the RoboCop Law Enforcement unit, OCP sees its goal of urban pacification come closer and closer, but as this develops, a new narcotic known as "Nuke" invades the streets led by God-delirious leader Cane. As this menace grows, it may prove to be too much for Murphy to handle. OCP tries to replicate the success of the first unit, but ends up with failed prototypes with suicidal issues... until Dr. Faxx, a scientist straying away from OCP's path, uses Cane as the new subject for the RoboCop 2 project, a living God.

A disease carried by common cockroaches is killing Manhattan children. In an effort to stop the epidemic an entomologist, Susan Tyler, creates a mutant breed of insect that secretes a fluid to kill the roaches. This mutant breed was engineered to die after one generation, but three years later Susan finds out that the species has survived and evolved into a large, gruesome monster that can mimic human form.

The Zodiac murders cause the lives of Paul Avery, David Toschi and Robert Graysmith to intersect.

A young man visits his fiancé's estate to discover that her wheelchair-bound scientist father has discovered a meteorite that emits mutating radiation rays that have turned the plants in his greenhouse to giants. When his own wife falls victim to this mysterious power, the old man takes it upon himself to destroy the glowing object with disastrous results.

Following a plane crash a group of schoolboys find themselves on a deserted island. They appoint a leader and attempt to create an organized society for the sake of their survival. Democracy and order soon begin to crumble when a breakaway faction regresses to savagery with horrifying consequences.

In a rundown area of Buenos Aires, at the dawn of the 1980s, Adrian LeDuc owns both a struggling movie theater and a shabby apartment building filled with eccentric, squabbling tenants. To make ends meet, Adrian takes in a roommate, Jack Carney, but soon begins to suspect that the quiet American is responsible for a series of political assassinations that are rocking the city.

Industrialist François Delambre is called late at night by his sister-in-law, Helene, who tells him that she has just killed her husband. Reluctant at first, she eventually explains to the police that he invented a matter transportation apparatus and, while experimenting on himself, a fly entered the chamber.

Mark 13 is a government-built killing machine programmed with artificial intelligence, able to repair and recharge itself from any energy source. Through a series of coincidences, the cyborg's head ends up in the home of a sculptress as a bizarre Christmas present from her boyfriend. Once inside its new home, the cyborg promptly reconstructs the rest of its body using a variety of household utensils and proceeds to go on a murderous rampage.

The Leiningen South American cocoa plantation is threatened by a 2-mile-wide, 20-mile-long column of army ants.

Brian comes under the addictive spell of a parasite with the ability to induce euphoric hallucinations in its hosts.

