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The doors of perception in the academic psyche, the ripple in the cylinder that dilates into a maelstrom. "Radical-hip stuff" is no longer enough for the Harvard brain (William Hurt), "the original self" is the objective, the primordial slime sought inside an isolation tank. The Creator expires in tandem with the father, romance with the charming anthropologist (Blair Brown) cannot possibly compete with solipsistic hallucinations. "Sometimes I wonder if it's me that's being made love to. I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God." Mushrooms and blood in the Mexican cave point the way, the churning lava of mental landscapes gradually takes over until the inner ape comes out. "Some of these tank trips can get pretty creepy." Robert Louis Stevenson by way of Paddy Chayefsky, heavily hoked by Ken Russell as a burlesque of serious science-fiction and an extension of his mad biopics, the overreaching artist as "a fucking gorilla." The delirium offers the goat-messiah nailed to the cross and the wife bare to replace a lizard, the petrified couple from the end of L'Age d'Or have a cameo. The unchained id is a hairy little acrobat on a tear, outracing hounds and clubbing security guards, waking up next to an eviscerated antelope at the zoo. "It was the most supremely satisfying time of my life." The next step is toward the infinitesimal, the hero's upside-down visage smiles eagerly in the transformative fluid. (Hans Richter and Kubrick's Star Gate inform the sequence, with a certain Orphic touch as the wife braves the spirals for the beloved fool turned protozoan.) "She's still crazy about him. He's still crazy." Cronenberg in The Fly pushes to the other side of the visceral poetic. Cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth. With Bob Balaban, Charles Haid, Dori Brenner, Thaao Penghlis, Miguel Godreau, George Gaynes, John Larroquette, and Drew Barrymore.
--- Fernando F. Croce |