Altered States

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Film Description

A twisting journey through horror, fantasy, satire, and farce (this is, after all, a Ken Russell film) to make some valid points about scientific responsibility and human nature. Academy Award Winner Hurt makes his debut as a scientist exploring different states of consciousness. Using hallucinogenic drugs he begins to experiment only to find that not all shifts in reality are contained within the head. Touching on everything from Darwin to Dianetics, this contains imagery that, even by Russell's baroque standards, is stunning.

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Review by Julian Upton on 25th October 2005

If Ken Russell ever had an equal as the world’s most technically assured punk film-maker then it was probably Russ Meyer, and it’s interesting to compare what happened to the two men when they tried to maintain their vision after accepting invitations to Hollywood.

Meyer’s big budget Hollywood debut – Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) – was lambasted by the critics and disowned by 20th Century Fox. He made one more contractual-obligation movie (The Seven Minutes) before retreating – wounded but not broken - to the independent milieu he knew best.

Russell, with Altered States, met with similar humiliation. The film’s screenwriter, the legendary Paddy Chayefsky (who also authored the source novel), was so disgusted with the results that he took his name off the project.

But what was Chayefsky expecting? Had he not seen a Ken Russell movie before? Altered States may not be about a composer, but it is classic Russell – hysterical, hallucinatory and hyper-kinetic. The movie’s whole raison d’etre – an exploration of the unhinged corners of the human mind – lends itself quintessentially to the director’s body of work. Indeed, as William Hurt’s research scientist slips into different states of consciousness, after experimenting with drugs and sensory deprivation, the film truly comes alive — Russell pulls out the stops and floods the screen with some of the most incendiary and outrageous images ever featured in American mainstream cinema.

Russell fans should not be disappointed with Altered States – it shows that he could take potentially conventional genre source material (no disrespect to Chayefsky) and make his indelible mark on it. But he got his fingers burnt in the process. Russell made one more American film (the equally bonkers Crimes of Passion [1984]) before his Hollywood sojourn came, sadly for us, to a premature end.

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This film is part of the following Film Collections

The Best of British Horror

Including: 28 Days Later, Alien, Allan Quatermain And The Lost City Of Gold, Altered States, An American Werewolf In London, Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Dont Look Now, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1981) (BBC), Dr Phibes Rises Again, Dracula, Prince of Darkness.

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