Ken Russell made some trippy movies in his prime. He built “Tommy” in 1975, “The Devil’s” in 1971 (slick historical horror flick, by the way), “Gothic” in 1986, “Lair of the White Worm” in 1988, and in 1980 he built “Altered States.” The movie was a pretty big deal, some 45 years ago, but for the most part it has since settled into mild obscurity.
Eddie is an academic at Columbia University, working with schizophrenic patients and experimenting with a sensory deprivation tank while out of his mind on hallucinogens. Great stuff, sounds like a terrible idea. Oh, and it’s 1967, which scans. Hippie trippy types were obsessed with acid back then. Hippies and the CIA. They liked acid too, for altogether different reasons. Anyway, Eddie just likes to trip balls and float in an iron lung until he sees enough crazy bullshit to make him happy.
Fast forward a number of years. He’s married with kids, living in Boston. The marriage is falling apart, because he’s an impossible head case, so he decides to go off to Mexico to do mushrooms in a cave. He sits around a circle of creepy old dudes who cook up a bunch of sticky brown slop over and open fire, takes a sip of the goo and blasts off into bizarro land.
Not the movie for epileptics, mind you, everything is all fast paced flashy and I’m not epileptic but still can’t rule out having a small seizure if I sit too close to the screen.
He comes out of his trip and gets sent away because he slaughtered a monitor lizard while he was high, which he apologized for. “Sorry, I was hallucinating, I thought it was my wife!” Oof, bad look. “Hey can I have some of that leftover hippie stew?” “Sure, knock yourself out” and he takes a jar of space juice back home with him, where he proceeds to get back into the psychedelic 60’s acid trip experiments (mid-life crisis maybe?). After one of these trips he comes out with a bloody face, and he’s now part monkey, and getting gorrillier each passing day!
The ending is not ideal (it feels like they hit a wall trying to sum everything up), but it’s just as trippy as the rest of the movie.