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The prologue sets the tone of splatter-slapstick, eyeballs burst over a nurse like custard pies hitting a Mack Sennett dowager. Russell's Altered States lays the groundwork for the perverse artist in academia, Jeffrey Combs' resemblance to Anthony Perkins as the scientific seeker is complemented by mock-Herrmann strings in the opening credits. "Independent research" at the medical campus, just the eternal triangle involving the earnest student (Bruce Abbott) and the dean's daughter (Barbara Crampton) and the new roommate who sets up lab in the basement. Gray matter and red fluids for the presiding surgeon (David Gale), a stentorian charlatan shown up by his pupil's fluorescent death-reversing serum—blackmail segues into decapitation segues into revivification, Green's The Brain That Wouldn't Die informs the bloody leer on the steel tray. "A good doctor knows when to stop" is advice blessedly unheeded by Stuart Gordon, whose vigorous sense of gross-out invention keeps escalating to the very end. (Between Combs' clenched-jaw deadpan and Gale's severed head rolling its eyes at its own stumbling torso, the perfect note is struck.) A dose of elixir to let the true innards run loose (cp. Hawks' Monkey Business): The "world's last living puritan" (Robert Sampson) turns frothing Renfield in a straitjacket, the unforgettable showstopper has the zombified professor getting ready to give the ingénue a licking. "I'm very disappointed in you. You steal the secret of life and death, and here you are trysting with the bubble-headed coed." Just when it looks like Gordon has gone as far as he can with voluminous viscera, a throng of mangled cadavers rise up right on cue and intestines shoot out like tentacles. Lovecraft's Frankenstein send-up, also Paul Morrissey's and Mel Brooks', a noble lineage. "Birth is always painful." With Gerry Black, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, and Peter Kent.
--- Fernando F. Croce |