10 Greatest Over-Acted Performances In Movie History
9. Dennis Hopper - Blue Velvet (1986)
David Lynch is a director who enjoys stark duality: light and dark, dreams and nightmares, the idyllic facade and the grotesque underbelly.
The opening sequence of Blue Velvet immediately captures the latter. The white picket fences and waving mailmen of wholesome suburbia belie an underworld of inexorable horror (and bugs!). And the human embodiment of this underworld is Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a psychotic man-child.
Hopper’s turn is huge. This too is typical Lynchian duality - half of his cast give performances of incredible subtly, whilst the other half tend to be a cavalcade of hooting and hollering monsters. He spends every frame snarling, grimacing or huffing gas through an oxygen mask. Every other word is Hopper yelling ‘f*ck’.
Hopper’s two craziest scenes are his first appearance, the highly disturbing rape of Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) - a scene which Roger Ebert famously hated - and the ‘Candy Coloured Clown’ sequence, which involves a lipstick-wearing Frank menacingly reciting the lyrics to Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ as a prelude to beating up Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan).
He is truly a nightmare brought to life.