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Poisons that blind you and poisons that open your eyes, says Strindberg, the plucked peeper in the beaker sets the Promethean theme. The visionary is a scientist (Ray Milland), the diagnosis of perception is his folly. "My dear friend, only the gods see everything." "My dear doctor, I'm closing in on the gods." The experimental serum is applied straight into the lens, "the splitting of the world" is a sudden discovery of multiple visual realms, psychedelic refractions upon psychedelic refractions. From voyeur at the nudie bash to savior in the surgery room to runaway, then Mr. Mentallo at the seaside sideshow. What peace can the new power bring the protagonist when it blazes through his eyelids at night? "I'd give anything, anything, to have the dark." Out of Wells and Borges, Roger Corman's stunning fable on modes of seeing, i.e. megalomania and religion and cinema itself. POV explorations turn the camera into a crimson iris—through it the concerned colleague (Diana Van der Vlis) is described as "a breathing dissection," the venal carny (Don Rickles) becomes a flaming skull. (Delaunay's spirals are a foundation, Neiman's prints are contemporaneous.) Fried retinas behind bulky shades for Corman's dislocated Modern Man, just another version of the laboratory monkey that keeled over from illumination. The treasure in the desert is a desperate ditch (chief amid the potent images is the stripping of Las Vegas neon to solarized smears), out of the casino and into the tent revival for Matthew's offending eye. "A city unborn, its flesh dissolved in an acid of light. A city of the dead." The inquiry continues through The Trip to arrive at Altered States. Cinematography by Floyd Crosby. With Harold Stone, John Hoyt, Morris Ankrum, John Dierkes, Dick Miller, and Jonathan Haze.
--- Fernando F. Croce |