“Take a script by Paddy Chayefsky* (Hospital, Network), known for his forced profundity and charged dialogue; give it to Ken Russell (Tommy, Lisztomania), a flamboyant director of visual exaggeration, and you get the mushrooming Altered States. This frantic film whirls about the brainy psycho-physiologist Jessup (William Hurt in his debut) and his drug-driven quest for the first kernel of consciousness. Armed with a fistful of psychotropic stimulants and an isolation tank, the agitated Doctor Jessup gets a brand new hide as he devolves into a quasi-ape and then finally into something as shapeless as the truth. Director Russell detonates this externalized inner journey with a hectic barrage of special effects that draw more from sixties psychedelia than eighties techno-pop. But what is most curious about Altered States is its own journey between genres. If sci-fi attempts to fascinate and horror to frighten, then Russell's prescription is to o.d. on fearful, nerve-wracking encounters with Chayefsky's ‘meaningless horror of life.' Side-stepping its own high-falutin' theories of consciousness, the film is more akin to The Fly and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the mad scientist falls prey to his own devices, than to works of speculative reverie. All in all, Altered States is an hallucinating trip down memory lane.” Steve Seid