Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Red-Barracuda The second of David Lynch's films, The Alphabet, is a significant progression from his debut Six Men Getting Sick. Where the latter was a short piece of static animation, The Alphabet incorporates stop-motion and live action alongside the animated sequences. It's a much more interesting film that achieves an undoubted nightmarish mood.Its genesis was a story Lynch's wife Peggy told him. She had witnessed her young niece experience a nightmare. In a little bed in a darkened room her niece recounted the alphabet in her tormented sleep. From this story Lynch devised a short film that approximates the feeling of a nightmare, one specifically where the fear connected with learning is the source of the unease. There is an alphabet song the like of which would be sung in schools, but removed into this context seems very disturbing. This is probably the first example of Lynch taking a seemingly harmless everyday thing and making it sinister with well chosen associative images and sounds. Indeed this is also the first time that the director utilises sound to disquieting effect, something he would become a master of. Here, we have not only the alphabet song sung by Peggy but also distorted baby crying. The latter being a recording he made of his daughter Jennifer that was corrupted because the tape recorder was faulty. But it was a mistake that produced a result the director loved, and it is indeed a disturbing sound that accentuates the mood perfectly. The Alphabet works often on a subconscious level but it does have a central core idea derived from the alphabet dream that is visualised here. A girl with a white face in a bed in a darkened room experiences the terror of the dream and ends up hemorrhaging blood all over her white night gown and bed sheets. It's a disturbing image but it represents a reaction to the forced learning that initiated the dream in the first place.With this film Lynch moved forward in an important way. It's the first time where his dark sensibility was used in a way that approximated the mood of a nightmare.

gavin6942 David Lynch's earliest work... a short film that somehow involves a girl (Peggy Lynch) and the alphabet, and what seems to be the most screwed-up nightmare anyone could ever possibly imagine. What inspires this sort of thing? I have no idea.The film has been called "avant garde", and I really can't think of a better classification. I'd say something a bit more vulgar, but I won't. One reviewer said this film is what should have been on the tape in "The Ring", and I think that's a fine suggestion. This could scare the pants off of many people.If you've seen Lynch's films, and I recommend pretty much all of them, you know he's capable of some messed-up imagery. I mean, the ear in "Blue Velvet"? Or all of "Lost Highway"? Crazy weird. But after you see this early work, you'll understand that Lynch has been weird for over forty years...

Ben Parker This was the first time David Lynch shot live-action footage. It isn't really a narrative film, like The Grandmother, but its more than a filmed moving painting like Six Men Getting Sick. It is mainly animation, truth be told, but it combines live action with it. This is what a child's nightmare looks like inside David Lynch's head - and let me tell you, its quite disturbing, on a par with Grandmother and Eraserhead.Some of its images, like the girl bleeding from the mouth and reciting the alphabet - i can't get out of my head. I don't know if that's a good thing... Lynch is a very strange man, indeed. And what we get in his films isn't half the story, as members of his website will tell you. There are images there that you wouldn't even know to be wary of, to not think about - images you don't even know to protect yourself from. But as Elephant Man showed us, he is also a master director, who can control himself and a major production to perfection. As Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr showed us, Lynch's world can also be lots of fun. He's one of my favourite filmmakers because he gives me both fun AND haunting in the same frame - a feat not many can do.

Michael_Cronin 'The Alphabet' has to be one of the most successful attempts to bring the atmosphere of a nightmare to film, even more so than 'Eraserhead', which Lynch once described as a filmed nightmare.The original inspiration for the film came from Lynch's then-wife, Peggy (who appears in the film as the little girl), describing to him how she heard her niece having a dream & repeating the alphabet.This mostly animated short is very abstract & disturbing, with a suitably twisted soundtrack, & although it's based around the alphabet, there's plenty of blood & a bit of sexual imagery. It really does invoke the type of loose, irrational feel of an actual dream, as opposed to the usual filmed 'dreams', which try to define themselves as such with soft focus & slow motion.