With all the excitement over the return of David Lynch’s series Twin Peaks next year to Showtime, it’s easy to forget that without Lynch’s film masterpiece Blue Velvet, there would be no Twin Peaks of which to speak. His seminal film — which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year — helped cement Lynch as one of the world’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers, and also helped resurrect his career after the notorious critical and commercial failure of his big budget sci-fi epic Dune.
Now Blue Velvet is returning to movie theater screens just in time for its 30th Anniversary thanks to Park Circus—both in the United States and in the U.K. The film will open for a weeklong run at Film Forum in New York City from March 25th through March 31st, 2016. Other anniversary screenings of the DCP restoration are on coming, but have yet to be announced. A U.K. reissue is expected in the fall of 2016.
You can check out a trailer for the re-release above, and you can take a peek at the film’s new poster below.
Blue Velvet stars Kyle MacLachlan —  the future Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks — as a young college student Jeffrey Beaumont, who discovers a severed ear in a field near his home. This begins a descent into a mystery that leads him down the rabbit hole of sex, drugs, and insanity that ultimately puts him face to face with one of cinema’s all-time greatest villains: drug dealer Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper. The film also stars a young Laura Dern in one of her earliest starring roles, and Isabella Rossellini as the tortured lounge singer with a horrible secret.
Blue Velvet exposed the seedy underside of an all-American logging town and shocked ’80s audiences.  The pop culture footprint of Blue Velvet remains fairly large—Lynch’s own Twin Peaks was pitched to the network as “Blue Velvet: The Series”—and if you’ve ever wondered why hipsters love Pabst Blue Ribbon beer so much, well… it can all be traced back to this film. One can also make the argument that singer Lana Del Rey’s whole career is a tribute to Blue Velvet.
Are you going to see Blue Velvet when it returns to theaters this year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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HT: Welcome to Twin Peaks
IMAGE: MGM/De Laurentis Entertainment Group
