Altered States: Critic Reviews

Dependably -- even exhilaratingly -- bizarre. Its strangeness, which borders cheerfully on the ridiculous, is its most enjoyable feature.

I was overwhelmed, I was caught up in its headlong energy.

There isn't a lucid moment in it (and much of the dialogue is rendered unintelligible by Russell's subversive direction), but it has dash, style, and good looks, as well as the funniest curtain line since Some Like It Hot.

Direction by Ken Russell has energy to spare, with appropriate match-up of his baroque visual style to special effects intensive material.

The film's too aggressively enjoyable to be completely dismissed, though the ending is risible -- I preferred it when this finale was later reconfigured and reused in a-ha's music video for "Take On Me."

Think of it as an extravagant and exhilarating, if over-the-top, piece of filmmaking that's silly, to be sure, but engrossing at the same time.

As the proceedings briskly fly, the silliness of the entire endeavor becomes more readily apparent.

Visually dazzling loopy drug film.

[Director Russell] fails to bring any clarity to the silly affair.

[Director] Russell's noisily grandiose swipe at psychedelia embellishes what is no more than the cosily familiar story of the obsessive Scientist Who Goes Too Far and Unwittingly Unleashes, etc.

William Hurt at his weirdest

Though deviating from Paddy Chayefsky's script (and novel), the reliably flamboyant Ken Russell made a spooky but engaging psycho-horror film about experimentation with human consciousness that deservedly received Oscar nods for sound and music.

trippy

Very intense, very inner self, very self absorbed.

Altered States explores the human drive to leave the body behind, to be born again, and to experience in the mind things that were once thought divine.

Mind-blowing imagery, solid Hurt performance; a first-class freak-out