Review of Altered States (1980) by Hatem A — 08 Sep 2013

"The ultimate trip" was the way the girl working at the video store I go to described it, I agree it was a crazy experience I probably never want to go through again, still it's worth watching at least once.

A scientist (William Hurt) obsessed with looking for mankind's true meaning, experiments by going inside an isolation chamber and taking hallucinatory drugs.

It's pretty weird and cool, I'd say it definitely belongs in Driver's list. It's one of those "transformation horror" movies, a subgenre Darren Aronofsky has mastered with "Pi", "Requiem for a Dream", and "Black Swan". The type of movie where the main character becomes obsessed with something to the point where he starts losing his mind and the movie changes from being Sci-fi or any other genre to horror.

I'm not finding it easy to describe what I felt, but I'd say its a hypnotic experience, it has a feeling I get when watching films by Kubrick or David Lynch, yet unlike "The Shining" (which I don't consider scary), this is effectively scary even though its more than 30 years old. It has some bizarre scenes around the end that had me terrified, even scarier than the horrifying scene in Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now".

Now about the things I didn't like about it, the DVD quality was horrible, the CGI during the last scene was so poorly made and crazy it was funny, and I kept on thinking that it would've been a lot more fun to watch with friends. With that said, I was expecting something experimental and more adequate for someone who usually enjoys art house movies, but I was wrong, it ended up being very entertaining and I couldn't keep my eyes off it.

I'm looking forward to finally watching Criterion10's beloved "The Devils" and other movies directed by Ken Russell.

I'd recommend it to people who liked movies similar to "The Fly", "The Woman", "Jacob's Ladder", "An American Werewolf in London", "Evil Dead", "2001: A Space Odyssey", and/or "Videodrome".