Altered States is thesp William Hurt’s mindfuck of a debut, and yeah, you see his ass a lot, but you also watch him EAT A SHEEP. And better yet, that’s not the film’s most shocktastic scene–no, not by a long shot.

Eccentric director Ken Russell’s bizarre masterpiece is suddenly topical again. His film is notorious for giving mind-expanding drugs the cult chic that Tron beget video games, and both films are still mocked and cherished for their budget-ballooned Goodwill special effects. But what shoved Altered States back into the flickering spotlight was Hurt, who loudly reemerged on the scene last year playing the standout character in A History of Violence, a film woven with high caliber performances.

That it would be Violence’s director David Cronenberg who rescued Hurt from the pits of Tuck Everlasting is a fitting 180, as Altered States is indistinguishable from Cronenberg’s early sci-fi efforts. This year, with Richard Linklater reviving Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly and Darren Aronofsky exploring similar reality-suspending subject matter in The Fountain, the kind of ‘80s edgy sci-fi that Altered States helped birth is back in theaters near you.

Altered States opens in a science lab typical of that decade, one a bit grittier than Real Genius, finding Hurt’s Harvard-funded there-must-be-more scientist character locked in a sensory deprivation chamber, naked and afloat in liquid. An impressively bearded and scruffy Bob Balaban speaks to him from a radio outside the tank, and the point is grasped damn quick: Hurt is hallucinating, intentionally.

Upon the second dip in the tank, we vicariously see what he sees–crashing lava, a crucified 10-eyed goat head with Jesus’ body, the usual. The third splash comes under the influence of a mysterious tribe’s oozy concoction, one alluding to Albert Hofmann’s vision-quest searches for the shamanic entheogen peyote, not to mention his landmark discovery of LSD in 1938. That breakthrough helped justify the 1960 Harvard Psilocybin Project led by some guy named Timothy Leary. Leary’s provocative and widely-scrutinized findings from that “study” were a sort of scary-smart blueprint that propagated the proceeding ‘60s counterculture and yucky tie-dye before Ronald Reagan stepped in with his War on Drugs, which just ended, right?

And yet, by the third tank experiment, there are 45-minutes of movie left, and not one secure idea as to whether the plot’s freaking out into A Clockwork Orange balls-out splurge of insanity or passively charting 2001’s meta-madness. Either conclusion seems fitting.

Yikes. Three more hallucination scenes follow, each registering higher on the Holy-Shit-O-Meter, until you’re hugging the relatively quiet, just-minutes-long epilogue for a brief chance to calm the hell down and find the DVD remote you flung across the room in a sheep-eating-induced, TV-flickering spasm.

There’s more extraneous, expository dialogue littered throughout to clarify Hurt’s teetering relationship with a female scientist, but to crib from the Netflix sleeve, Russell so disliked the script’s lines that he had the actors mutter them at ludicrous speed, like Mamet swallowing Tarantino’s stash. Russell drowns the lines in odd sound, thereby not voiding his director’s contract. The guy was a maniac, but the resourceful kind of maniac.

Altered States lives on at indie video shops and burrowed in the shag carpets of black-light burnouts, but ask boomers on the street today about William Hurt, and this movie’s going to come up the same amount as Michael is. And, regretfully, prior to his comeback in A History of Violence, even kids in the know would just crack, “William who?”

-Shawn Wines