| Overall Grade: |
B |
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| Story: |
B+ |
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| Acting: |
B |
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| Direction: |
B |
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| Visuals: |
B+ |
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An Acid Trip Movie!
by Yahoo! Movies User (movies profile)
Jun 20, 2005
1
of
1 people found this review helpful
This movie is a visually spectacular hallucinatory science fiction thriller which is certainly original and at times can be terrifying.
Even viewed now,25 years later,the visuals are still superb and breathtaking.This is a truly visceral experience,an acid trip without the acid.
Lush,colorful and completely over the top this is arguably eccentric director Ken Russell's best film.
Willaim Hurt stars,in his debut role as Eddie Jessup, a sort of mad scientist who is performing unorthodox and dangerous experiments on his own mind.He eats some hallucinogenic mushrooms and then submerges himself in a sensory deprivation tank (the thing that Michael Jackson sleeps in). While in the tank for hours he has vivid hallucinations that take him back to the point of creation,when he was just a single cell,floating in space.Things start to go wrong when his hallucinations start to occur during his everyday life,when he isn't in the tank and when he is, things begin to become frighteningly real.
Following the scientific jargon that the characters spew is confusing and humorous and the dialogue is spoken so fast that it's hard to make out what the actors are evn saying.Hurt is great i his first starring role and totally believable as a driven man who is messing with things that he has no business doing.He neglects his marriage and his children for the sake of his precious research and every one around him begins to grow concerned that he is losing his mind and the other scientists are baffled because his body seems to be taking on the musular and skeletal features of a primate. It seems that he is devolving,reversing his evolution and transgessing into the form of a cro-magnon man. This actually occurs in an admittedly schlocky B-movie scene reminiscent of hoaky 1950's sci-fi matinees.He jumps out of the tank as a full blown, hairy primate and follows a pack of wild dogs to a zoo where he feasts on a sheep and then wakes up again as William Hurt, naked and confused in the zoo,covered in blood.This both fascinates him and scares him,though it's definitely more of the former than the latter. This movie with all its visuals and muddled dialogue can grow a bit confusing but if you stay with it ,it can be very enetertaining and at times, startlingly effective.The ending is a bit preposterous and vague,as Hurt is taken to the beginning of everything, the brink of existence and gets lost in the void. To his horror there is no great revelation-there is just a void of nothing. In the end,love brings him back.
As wild and silly as all of this sounds it is classic sci-fi with all the elements set firmly in place.It's a stunning visual roller coaster ride with a tiny bit of melodrama thrown in. If you're a sci-fi fan,though you should definitely check this film out.I don't believe that you'll come away disappointed. |
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