Altered/Altered States

I caught two flicks recently: Altered and Altered States.

Altered States is as brilliant as brilliant gets. It's based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky -- the guy who wrote the script for Network -- and directed by Ken Russell.

It's about a Harvard professor (William Hurt, in his first major role) who has a theory that if you have strong enough visions, they'll actually change you into something closer to your real self. I'm wildly paraphrasing here -- the characters shoot massive reams to science talky-talk at each other. But it's never stiff or dull, the dialogue sounds like the converstions super-smart people would have while discussing out-there ideas.

Hurt is pretty insane, but he's such a genius everyone around him just kinda deals. It's hard to tell where the movie's going in the first act. We get a lot of scenes of tweedy East Coast professor types smoking weed and dealing with university politics.

But then Hurt hears about a drug South American Indians use in a ceremony to get a glimpse of their "earlier selves." He goes down there, fights through the Amazon, befriends the high priest, takes the drug... and trips his fucking balls off in a truly harrowing sequence. It's closer to Kenneth Anger than Ken Russell. It's some wild shit and, after all the New Yorky chitty-chat, it feels like a massive left turn. I was blind-sided in the best possible way. I was sitting there wondering how Wonder Boys suddenly turned into The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Hurt gets back to the States. Everyone thinks finding the drug is his big break. This is the kinda thing that would make a career for life for most professors. But those assholes are just looking for anything that'll score them a cushy tenured gig so they can spend their lives smoking weed and wearing tweed. Hurt's looking for the truth, man. So he strikes on an idea: what if he takes the drug while he's locked in a sensory deprivation tank? Wouldn't that be cool?

From that point on, the movie gets weird.

I won't ruin anything. The closest approximation I can make to describing this film is Woody Allen meets H.P. Lovecraft. There are a lot of Lovecraftian elements: the one-the-fringe professor doing unauthorized experiments with weird science, the ideas of time travel and genetic regression, the East Coast university setting, the bizarre shit, etc.

I'm always trying to catch up on older movies. I've seen a ton of stuff, but I'm still always tripping over flicks that make me slap my forehead and wonder why it took me so long to get around to watching them. This is one of 'em.

On the other end of the scale: Altered.

It's a horror flick directed by Eduardo Sanchez, one of the two guys who directed The Blair Witch Project.

I fucking love Blair Witch. Speaking of Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell wrote in a forward to a collection of his short stories that he felt Blair Witch is on of the most Lovecraftian films he's ever seen. I totally agree. Not in a Mythos sense, but in the way we get very little of the menace in any direct way, it's all about inference. It's a movie about fear of the unknown, the core concept of Lovecraft's stories. And I'm not too proud to say I saw it twice in the theater, and it scared the living shit outta me both times.

Altered is a really good example of a lot of the horror movies that are getting made right now: high concept, single location, franchisable villain, direct-to-DVD release. It's a mantra I frequently hear and repeat at the day job.

It opens with three rednecks hunting an alien in the woods. This scene made me laugh, but only for my own, super-personal reasons... I used to play bass in a band called Joe Happy. We had a song called "No Such Thing As Humans," which was about a reverse alien abduction -- the rednecks abduct some frightened aliens -- including the, ahem, anal probing. It's the story of what would've happened if E.T. ran into the Deliverance crew. Fun stuff.

They capture an alien and take it to this dude's automotive garage in the middle of the night. Dialogue reveals that all four of these guys were abducted by aliens when they were kids. They had a friend who died. These four survived, but forever Altered, physically and mentally. Haunted for years by the memories, and derision of their fellow man, the rednecks decided to strike back.

They don't quite realize the shitstorm they call down onto themselves. The alien is one bad motherfucker. There's also a lot of the standard-issue internal dissention we've seen in movie situations like this since Alien. They yell stuff like, "Put the gun down, Cody!"

It's a cool concept, the story is nice and tight and full of clever double-tensions, and we get some truly fucked-up situations. But it's hampered by some shitty dialogue. Unfortunately, all of the characters are filtered through the Hollywood screenwriter idea of how lower-income white Southerners talk and act. They're all named stuff like "Duke" and "Cody" and "Wyatt" and "Otis" and say shit like "dad-gummit!" and "confoundit!" The guy who plays Duke is really good. But the actor who plays the ostensible lead, Wyatt -- he's got chops, but I never for a second bought him as anything but a New York actor doing a Southern accent. He looks like a guy who should be playing a detective on CSI, or flying a Viper in Battlestar Galactica.

I'm not such an asshole that I demand cinema verite low-budget horror movies. I mean, fuck -- it's not like Bobbie Joe in Evil Dead II is someone out of a Tennessee Williams play. But that movie is so over-the-top, you come to expect broad caricature. She fits the world and tone of the movie. Altered is trying to present an intense, locked-room situation. So when you get the male version of Bobbie Joe times four, it comes across as fakey and distracting.

That is, unless you've never been to the South, or encountered Southerners in real life. In which case you might think all Southerners act like supporting characters from Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard, so you probably won't notice or care.