Fire Walk With Me

     Fire Walk With Me is a prequel film to the hit TV series Twin Peaks from the early '90s. Since Twin Peaks was mostly the story of who killed Laura Palmer, the prequel is naturally about the last week of Laura Palmer's life. We didn't see much of Laura in the series obviously because it starts off with her death, so getting to see her acting out all the things we already knew she did was really cool. I mean, we already knew that although Laura was the homecoming queen and did honorable things like helping with Meals on Wheels, tutoring Josie Packard with her English, and helping the mentally challenged Johnny Horne, she was also into drugs, prostitution, and S&M. The mystery of who killed her captivated the nation and had everyone wondering who the hell killed her. Around episodes 17-18 we finally find out that her father had been molesting her for years and finally killed her because he was possessed by an inhabiting spirit called Bob. 

      The main protagonist of the TV series is Special Agent Dale Cooper played by Kyle MacLachlan, and even though he was the main character in the series, he doesn't play a huge role in the film because Laura isn't dead yet so he has no real reason to be there. Plus, he didn't really want to be in the movie for fear of being typecast since he was trying to be considered a serious film actor. Instead, we have Special Agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley, played by Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland respectively. Both are investigating the murder of Teresa Banks, who is the murder victim just before Laura is killed. Only through the prequel though do we learn that Teresa and Laura were both prostitutes who sometimes worked together. 

      Many people weren't exactly fans of the movie because they thought it lacked the taste and class that the TV series had. After all, as a feature film, it was allowed the courtesy of profanity and nudity.  But in my opinion, it didn't really take away from the story. I mean, Laura did a lot of salacious things, and if we're gonna see her doing all the things we only heard about in the series, it's gonna have some scenes that are a little more intense. Sheryl Lee who plays Laura does an incredible job and acted her tush off in this role, and really gave the character some serious depth by giving it her all. 

      The movie premiered in 1992 about a year after the TV series finished its second season and was canceled. Many characters were written out of the movie, mostly because they either didn't have much to do with Laura's death or just didn't care to reprise their roles for the film. Another reason that most characters didn't show up was that the original version of the movie ran just over five hours long, but was cut down to just over two hours due to the restraints that were put on director David Lynch to keep the film a little shorter than that. This caused a lot of continuity errors and subplots that had no resolution or just plain didn't make sense. Personally, I thought this added to the mystery that Twin Peaks already had and matched the series quite well. Years later, a lot of outtakes and extended scenes were assembled together to form a movie of sorts called "The Missing Pieces" which was released as a feature film, one that doesn't actually resemble a film at all and just looks like what it was, a random collection of unneeded scenes that would've just slowed the movie down had they remained in the final version. Hopefully, fans will someday put the movie and missing pieces together in addition to the other 2-3 hours of missing footage that David Lynch was forced to cut from Fire Walk With Me in order to finally realize his original vision of the film. 

      One glaring change in the film is the replacement of Lara Flynn Boyle as Donna Hayward with actress Moira Kelly. Rumor has it that Lara didn't want to film the nude scenes, but she soon afterward starred in the movie The Road to Wellville in which she appeared topless, so nobody really knows her true reasons for declining to appear in Fire Walk With Me. The character of Donna Hayward was crucial to Laura's story though so her character couldn't be written out. Fortunately, Moira Kelly did a pretty good job playing the part so I can't complain. 

      I was one of the few people who saw the prequel movie before actually watching the TV series, which just made me more of a fan of the whole Twin Peaks phenomenon. There's much more backward talk in the movie too which I always thought was a really cool idea, by having the actors speak phonetically backward, then running the film backward so that the actors sounded strange and ethereal. Altogether I thought the movie was very well done despite the flaws that fans of the series love to complain about.