Warner Home Video is releasing a Bluray of Ken Russell‘s Altered States (’80) on 7.10. I’m not sure if the primitive FX are going to look worse or better in high-def. I love how William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban and Charles Haid tear through Paddy Chayefsky‘s whip-snap dialogue during the first three quarters, but the film loses dramatic tension when Hurt turns into an ape man.
And yet Brown’s line about having sex with Hurt — “I feel like I’m being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God” — will live forever.
