Altered States (1980) - Ken Russell

Style over substance is the best way to describe the cinema of Ken Russell. He consistently made adventurous and exciting visual feasts, but very rarely were these films actually successful in and of themselves. Altered States is not much difference. Paddy Chayefsky wrote the screenplay based on his novel and was so disappointed with the film that he used an alias for the screenplay. Russell's flair for the visual is well in tact, as William Hurt goes through one hallucination after another and the entire film comes across as a break between weird trips. Along the way the film develops something of a werewolf subplot with Hurt's genetics changing to something of a simian caveman. Describing the plot is hard, and explaining the ending is harder, but in a few sequences you just have to stop and hang with your mouth open.