ALTERED STATES (1980)

With debuts for 30-yr-old William Hurt and 3-yr-old Drew Barrymore, this was also the Hollywood debut (and farewell) for hit-and-miss/iconoclastic Brit director Ken Russell. His outre style proving too much for Paddy Chayefsky who took his name off the script, but retained credit for the source novel. The basic idea is a sort of New Age Jekyll & Hyde with hallucinatory Mexican mushrooms & a water-logged deprivation chamber regressing William Hurt’s God-denying/ origin-seeking research scientist back a couple of hirsute evolutionary steps. And not only in his mind. More fun than you may recall, the film, a pricey flop at the time, has Russell amping up a crazed buzz to help bury much of Chayefsky’s windbag philosophizing, emphasizing its possibilities as sound-and-light-show. He also got Hurt and Blair Brown, as his equally intellectual wife, to bare a helluva lot o’ skin for the period. Very nice skin it is, too. (Brown usually with a reason for stripping down; Hurt a nudist for all seasons.) As college colleagues, Bob Balaban & Charles Haid vie for Most Annoying Supporting Performer (Haid wins), but the story has enough momentum to get past them. Or does until the script cops out with a love-will-conquer-all finish. Kudos to cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth who followed this showy display with grungy naturalism in CUTTER’S WAY/’81 before the glitzy futurism of BLADE RUNNER/’82; and to John Corigliano for his discomforting music score.

DOUBLE-BILL: Ken Russell’s best work was in the late-‘60s and ‘70s, but he nearly returned to form and caught something impressively mad with THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM/’88.