Altered States (1980)

William Hurt as a university professor. He sleeps with his students and experiments with an isolation tank. It's tank where you float in water. There's no light, no sound, no feeling. A certain percentage of people in these things will start to hallucinate. I remember a teacher talking about this in the mid-'70's. Hurt's character also takes hallucinogens. He begins having visions of early hominids and begins to physically transform into a little prehistoric apeman.

There are things that wouldn't happen today. A janitor sees the apeman from a distance and tells a security guard that a chimpanzee escaped from the lab. The two men walk through the place looking for the chimp. I think people now realize how dangerous apes are and would stay out of there. Of course, they were no match for the caveman, either.

The script was by Paddy Chayefsky. His dialog was verbose, better suited to 1920's stage play than a movie. Director Ken Russell couldn't make any significant changes without Chayefsky suing him, so he had to figure out how to make this terrible dialog sound realistic. He had the actors talk fast, yell, or talk while eating. When I saw this thing as a teenager, I realized they could have relaxed and delivered all their lines speaking calmly. It left me with warped ideas about acting. Everything is expressed verbally. Emoting doesn't add much to it.

With Charles Haid just one year before Hill Street Blues, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban and 5-year-old Drew Barrymore. Miguel Godreau as the Primal Man.

One of the few movies where an apeman has clearly defined buttocks.

I fell asleep with this playing on streaming video. Was awakened by the apeman shrieking and decided not to watch the rest of it alone in the dark.