Altered States

Altered States (1980)

Runtime: 102 minutes

Directed by: Ken Russell (no relation)

Starring: William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid

From: Warner Bros.

What an unusual yet enthralling movie this was. While it's hard to fully describe using only words and not spoiling much, I still attempt to explain why below: 

Here is one of those movies where I remember the movie's poster as a VHS cover from my days as a kid when I saw it while browsing the videostores. Yes, I am dating myself here. Yet it wasn't until last night that I finally gave it a shot. It is pretty good, and no surprise that it's weird given the director is Ken Russell... no relation. But he wasn't the first director hired to do the film and by his standards this is somewhat normal.

The plot: William Hurt plays a typical William Hurt kind of character... a haughty, arrogant but brilliant guy (he is a college professor of psychology at Harvard, after all) who meets then marries fellow genius Blair Brown as he and Bob Balaban do experiments in sensory-deprivation tanks. It's done for research reasons but apparently it's a real trip. We flash-forward in time and their relationship is troubled; he ends up in Mexico and yeah it's a trope, but he meets an Indian tribe and takes some wacky psychotropic drug and he gets the bright idea to combine that with being in a sensory-deprivation tank; it creates quite the result that is an incredible scientific breakthrough... but it's also quite dangerous, to say the least.

No surprise given the background of the two leads that big concepts and 10 dollar words are thrown about. I don't mean that negatively; I am just clarifying what sort of film it is. Things are usually over the top, sometimes ridiculously so. Yet it's always compelling and the psychedelic images you get to see are definitely unforgettable; for sure the images are better seen than described. They are quite wild and quite bizarre. Considering it's a movie about the mind and how much of it is still a mystery along with talk of mankind's origins, no surprise this is quite the trip, in several different ways.

This is based on a Paddy Chayefsky novel; he did not like either original director Arthur Penn or Russell and did not like this film adaptation; I haven't read the book so I can't compare the two. I can say that this is a different sort of horror movie and if what I described sounds enticing, then you can check this out.