mattneub-1 Review of Altered States

Altered States (1980)

A Very Intelligent Concept Becomes, a Movie, a Bad Movie

[2/10 · 28 April 2005]

This movie begins well enough. Two professors are experimenting with sensory deprivation tanks, with one of them, Hurt, as the test subject. Years later the two meet again and begin experiments with the tanks while taking powerful hallucinogenic drugs. This combination reveals to Hurt visions which he believes are primordial species-wide memories, primates hunting and fighting and what not. As the movie continues Hurt takes greater doses of the drugs and goes "back" further and further until, and this is where the movie loses me, he turns into a monkey. At this point, ladies and gentleman, the movie begins to smell more than what that monkey is throwing The once clever plot becomes like that of a bad horror film, too dumb to be scary and too serious to be funny. The final scenes are so ridiculous as to be laughable. Sober or otherwise this movie is not good.