“Mudhoney is Meyer's neglected masterpiece: his most interesting, most ambitious, most complex, and longest independent production. He describes it as a case of overachievement; it was not necessary, or perhaps even wise, he believes, to expend so much energy on a movie that had so few directly exploitable elements. Nevertheless, it won an enthusiastic response at the Yale retrospective, and one critic described it as looking like a recently rediscovered 1930s Gothic drama in the visual style of King Vidor.
“Mudhoney's plot is impossible to synopsize in a limited space (Meyer's plots are either capable of being described in a sentence or impossible to describe at all). But it has to do with a fanatic preacher, a terrorized town that turns to mob violence, and a backwoods family that is apparently deficient in all genes not related directly to chest development. The visual style is unlike Meyer's other work: he opens with a protracted shot of feet walking through the village, and closes with a terrifically effective point-of-view shot of a body toppling into an open grave; in between, there is more mood, more languorous camera movement, and less quick-cutting than we expect from Meyer.”