"Altered States" (1980) d/ Ken Russell

Time to tune in, turn on, and drop out here at the Wop with tonight's review, a sometimes dazzlingly perceptive inward journey into man's baser self through the abuse of heavy hallucinogenic drugs and sensory deprivation tanks, as documented through the artful lens of Ken Russell, no stranger himself to bizarre visuals. I walked down to the American Theater for this one, upon release in 1980, and though I was expecting something more from the production, the one sheet still ended up on display in my room for years, as the black sheep of my collection ( long since been replaced  by 'Student Bodies' and 'Poliziotto superpiu', if you're keeping score at home).FX god Dick Smith provides some unforgettable work, as usual, in supplying amorphous face-trippers, cracked bodysuit bitches, schitzy proto-humans, and more, for a game cast headed by William Hurt and Blair Brown, .

"...now cue that copy of "Burnt Weenie Sandwich", maaan, I'm peaking balls!"
Ed Jessup (Hurt) is the local college's Abnormal Psych professor extraordinaire, and as such he's the envy of his colleagues, Arthur and Mason (Bob Balaban, Charles Haid) and the love object of fellow brainiac, Emily (Brown), who somehow convinces him to marry her amid his exhausting studies on schizophrenia and much sweaty couch sex. While grooving his days away in a sensory deprivation tank he surmises that even sleep states of consciousness can be brought to the surface, and pisses off to Mexico to partake in a hallucinogenic Indio mushroom party to prove his point. After tripping his face off in the middle of the jungle (hard, bro), the violent fungal roller coaster ride awakens a sudden desire to devolve into a naked, howling caveman in the prof. His desire quickly becomes obsession, as he ignores the pleas of reason from his assistants, and his now ex-wife and kids in favor of a canning jar fulla the stuff the tribe's medicine man must've let him bring home(!).


I'm not exactly sure what she's doing here, but I like it a lot.
Before too long, Eddie's running around, screeching like a monkey on bath salts, clobbering campus guards to near-death (Ohhh, that explains how Jessup and Co. are allowed back into the campus lab afterwards, he only nearly killed people in a drugged-out haze, gotcha.) and biting antelopes at the zoo, which naturally leads his wife and assistants to 180° their positions on the potentially deadly experiments, now enthusiastically supporting his decision to go ahead and fuck with his inner chemistry like a mad Russian Roulette player. He begins to lose control of his transformations, leading to a knock down, drag out orgy for the eyes as he becomes a shapeless lump of humanity, while his ex-wife naturally realizes that stripping nude and becoming a neon lightning-being is the only way she can rescue him from the mental abyss...


There's something you don't see every day...
A wee Drew Barrymore briefly appears as Hurt's daughter, and since we've never mentioned her before here and she's clearly too hot for such an injustice to continue, I threw that in. Schizophrenic as Syd Barrett in a cellar full o' psilocybin, States never seems certain of its own identity, mixing appropriately trippy imagery and lengthy moral tirades about the dangers of undertaking such a reflective journey, with mixed results in the end. Normally, reporting on Russell's usual level of artistic flair in the director's chair plus solid performances from Hurt and Brown and the Kafkaesque Smith effects work would merit a higher ratings scale score than the pedestrian deuce, but the meh feeling I'm left with afterwards, even after repeated viewings over the years, demands that I give it such. That said, I'll still watch it again sometime in the future, and you should probably give it a look, as well, if any of what I've just discussed grabs you.


Three decades later, we finally see the devastating long term effects of repeated exposure to Lipps, Inc.

'Blue Sunshine" (1978) d/ Jeff Lieberman

I can't imagine a more terrifying prospect to the self-engrossed "in crowd" of the late seventies than to discover one's feathered back 'Eight is Enough' 'do disaffiliating itself with their dome, due to some minor hallucinatory indiscretions from a decade earlier. That giant back pocket comb would be worthless, man, think about it. Jeff Lieberman of 'Squirm' and 'Just Before Dawn' fame knew the world didn't wanna boogie with wigged-out eggheads, and thus, tonight's review, an exemplary freak-out flick seasoned with laugh out loud camp, heavy Cronenberg vibes, and Hamill-coiffed disco dollies abound.


"Aaargh! What the hell happened to my Chachi haircut?"
A party at a cabin the woods goes sour when Frannie (Richard Crystal) gets his postiche pilfered in mid-Sinatra tune (what you trying to say over there, Jeff!), causing him to throw screaming girls into the fireplace like a real nut. When Frannie's buddy Zipkin (Zalman King) ends his zany antics by shoving him him in front of an eighteen wheeler, he's compelled to dramatically run around, acting like Columbo and looking like the kosher Sean Penn in uncovering the real reason behind his friend's impromptu homicidal schitz, instead of turning himself in and letting the cops deal with it. With his disco sweetie Allison (Deborah Winters) keeping the detectives at bay and a suit borrowed from an old doctor pal (Robert Walden), he ties the increasing number of baldy murders to a shady local politician named Edward Flemming (Mark Goddard), whose wife has been experiencing headaches and hair loss, herself, of late. The follicles may be thinning, but the plot thickens...


Toupee or not toupee? That is the question.
It seems that while all parties involves were enrolled at Stanford U, Fleming doled out some bunk chromosome-altering acid called "Blue Sunshine" that causes the dose-dropper to lose his locks, become aggro at loud noise, and in the end, homicidal. Before the whole delirious tale is hastily wrapped up with on screen character updates a la 'Animal House', you'll see crazy eggheaded broads chasing little kids around with butcher knives, burly Irish sportos-turned-enraged-lightbulb-heads hurling horrified groove thang-shakers through the air, polyester first, at an indoor mall discotheque (!!), Sinatra and Streisand puppet shows, and Zipkin rescuing Allison from the disco booth with an air gun full of tranquilizers. You might feel as though you've tripped your face off, yourselves, by the time the end credits roll here, so you might wanna check your collective hairlines in the mirror. You never know...


"...but you gotta play 'Night on Disco Mountain' for me, lady!"
It's really pretty amazing how engaging this one ends up being, despite the ridiculous mad baldies premise. I, too, was skeptical prior to my first viewing, it having been the last of Lieberman's films of the era I hadn't seen, but I came away impressed as usual, and it might be my favorite of his films, to date. I dunno, JBD holds special golden slasher era memories for me. We'll have to call it a toss up for now. On the scale, a Three wops triple-dipped blotter for your mind's eye . Recommended.


I'm the same way when I miss a spot, believe me.

"The Trip"(1967)d/Roger Corman

Inverse to the producers' warning that precedes tonight's review, a Hollywood flirtation with head-freakin' hallucinogenics as penned by no less than Jack Nicholson, is a short disclaimer from this guy over here:Ah, glorious lysergic acid diethylamide.Where does a guy like me begin to write about our many mind-blowing escapades together over the years.Without your entheogenic pleasures, I might not have ever mooned state troopers from a van window, shouting:"Behold! The fancy ass of the DEVIL!", I might not have been bitten by a pissed off African baboon spider that I thought I was communicating with, I might not have stopped my vehicle in courthouse traffic, worried that the front of the car, engine and all, had just dissolved into liquid metal and poured onto the asphalt.I might never have played naked hide n' seek with my girlfriend all over my apartment, culminating in a vista-revealing bathtub fuck that unlocked the secrets of the universe to me.Oh, you get the idea, already.Potent acid is tits, dudeskis.Tonight's feature focuses on some hip cats of the day and just such a journey to the center of the mind, as portrayed by genre faces Peter Fonda, Susan Strasberg, Bruce Dern, and Dennis Hopper, among others, and as directed by the original Motor City Madman and B-Movie Bishop, Roger Corman, in between his uncredited work in the director's chair on A Time for Killing(1967) and 1968's The Wild Racers.Semi-corny in its posi-delivery of the microgram-laden mirth; it's always a good time to viddy when you're in an altered state yourself.Diiiig...

"Yeah, I was Babalugats in 'Cool Hand Luke', maaann, I'll bogart this spleefie if I want to..."
Paul Groves(Peter Fonda) is a mild-mannered director of television commercials in the midst of a heavy divorce from his unfaithful wife, Sally(Susan Strasberg), a chick who's not opposed to rocking a salmon polyester pantsuit out in public just for kicks.Is it any wonder he's looking for some introspective on his own successes and failures in one o' them there acid trips all them youngins seem to be poppin' off on, in between their flower power and their Lothar and the Hand People records.He enlists his buddy, John(Bruce Dern), as a chaperone for his twelve hour mental vacation, as provided by Max(Dennis Hopper), a babbling, reef-tokin' white Navajo wanna-be in leather dungarees, who owns the local psychedelically painted drug spot frequented by the upper eschelon of turn-onners, tune-inners, and obligatory drop outs.A hot young blonde tells him that she thinks "acid-takers are groovy."Paul retreats upstairs with John and drops with some apple juice, while Max passes around a hog's leg downstairs and mumbles incoherently.John tells his soon-to-be-soaring associate that he probably won't wanna eff with all the recording equipment he's laid out for himself once he's on his trip.Before you can say, "Down on Phillip's Escalator", Paul's starting to see some things over there.John, guarding against a possible freakout, tells him, "I'm gonna be here, man, trust me.", as Paul starts getting into some beautiful stuff, like holding the sun in his hands, and swimming bare-assed and free.He imagines bedding the hot blonde from earlier and his soon-to-be ex-wife at the same time in a groovy ménage à trois until he's being chased on the beach by Templar-esque knights on horseback.Then he's on a merry-go-round with midgets being forced to watch his spouse share adulterous kisses with another man on a big screen, while Max appears and passes hippie judgement upon him for working for a living.John! John, where's that thorazine, maaaaaan!I wanna get off!

Would you let this man chaperone your first acid trip? Me neither.
John pulls the incoherent naked wreck out of the pool and towels him off, then does exactly what he promised he wouldn't do, in leaving Paul alone while he's gone to score some more juice.Paul imagines John is slumped dead in a chair with a paintified headwound, and slips out into the street in the middle of the night, peaking his nuts off.He lets himself into a strange household, rousing the resident little girl from her sleep, watching television with her and getting her a drink until her father wakes up and scares him off.He grooves on the washing machines at a laundromat and suggests to a spinster-in-curlers that they communicate with each other using only their minds, before running off when she calls the police as he tries to free the girl he imagines he sees spinning in a dryer full of the woman's clothes.He snags a table at a psychedelic club on Sunset Strip, but splits prematurely when the cops make the scene, somehow making his way back to Max's place to come down in the process.After he tells the drug dealer he may have led the cops to his doorstep, he's told to head back to the strip where John, who isn't dead afterall, can collect him again.This time, he bumps into the aforementioned hot blonde who speeds off with him in her convertible sports car to her place, where they have all kinds of trippy sex, while he hallucinates about the hooded knights, only they're Sally and the blonde in disguise.The next morning, she asks him whether his trip was a good one or not, and he remarks that though he found love, he may need another day to reflect upon the turn of events, as the screen freeze-frames on his face, then cracks like glass, Fulci-style.Roll credits...

Sex whilst trippin' face? L.S.D.elicious!
As you might have guessed, the flagrant use of boring jazz in the soundtrack was a big red light for me.I'm thinking Corman should have scored some genuine psych rock instead, a la Pink Floyd or the Amboy Dukes, for authenticity's sake, I dunno.You can see Henry Fonda's rebellious son, who's experienced a sort of cinematic renaissance of late, in a treasure trove of genre cult classics;The Wild Angels(1966), Spirits of the Dead(1967), Easy Rider(1969), Spasms(1983), and even the crappy remake of Escape From New York, 1996's Escape From LA.Dern, a premier psycho in television and movies dating back to 1960, was at his genre best in the late sixties/early seventies, scoring credits in everything from Bloody Mama(1970) and The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant(1971) to Black Sunday(1976) and Hitchcock's Family Plot(1976).The curler-coiffed Barboura Morris dates back to early Corman, appearing in The Wasp Woman(1959) and The Haunted Palace(1960).Judy Lang, who plays Fonda's blonde sex-interest, can also be spotted in The Psycho Lovers and Count Yorga, Vampire.Curiously, LSD-25 was last completely legal in the United States in 1966, but you don't have to be a hardcore blotterhead to enjoy the cultish charm of Trip, which earns two double-dipped wops on the ratings scale.Add it to your collection.

Woooooooooow, maaaaahnnnn...