Altered States/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Special Effects Failure: The hallucinatory sequences (of which there are many) are brilliant, but William Hurt in a fur suit just doesn't scream Australopithecus, especially considering that Stanley Kubrick made more convincing Ape-like human ancestors with late-sixties special effects in 2001. Kubrick probably had more money to work with though: Ken Russel's "primitive hominid" character looks like something out of a 1930's serial.
    • Actually, some of the hallucinations look like what they are: drops of paint exploding on Petri dishes. Bran Ferren replaced John Dykstra after the latter quit the film, one of the many things that went wrong.