3/5 Solitary Man
  by Richard Ross
William Hurt makes a memorable film debut as research scientist Eddie Jessup in this Ken Russell masterpiece. Jessup works with schizophrenics and is constantly amazed by their alleged religious experiences during hypnosis. Hoping to gain first hand experience, Jessup starts experimenting with an isolation tank housed in the basement of a hospital. Closely monitored by his friend and assistant (Bob Balaban) Jessup goes back in time and relives painful memories such as the death of his father and has his own religious experiences. Eddie meets a fellow Ph.D named Emily (Blair Brown) at a party and the two hit it off. Both are intense and inquisitive and they eventually marry and start a family. However, Jessup wants to take his experiments further so he leaves Emily and their two kids so that he can travel to Mexico and take part in a shaman's ceremony. Jessup is given some powerful and unidentified drugs in liquid form and his hallucinations become more dangerous and possibly deadly. When he returns stateside, with the still unidentified drug, he combines his new find with the isolation tank and things turn into a living nightmare for Jessup and those around him. Without revealing any of the horrors that follow, I'll only say that Emily has begun studying primates in their natural habitat and she may not have to go far to study her subjects. Hurt is hypnotic as Jessup making Eddie a dreamer who is determined at all costs to literally go deeper into himself and find out all about man and himself in the process. Brown is quite attractive and is just as intense as Hurt. She does a good job of capturing the pain and fear of a woman who loves her husband but is forced to watch him succumb to his demons and then worry about what he's capable of doing next. The film has amazing visuals, particularly religious imagery. These scenes are both beautiful and frightening at the same time. A well made thriller from Russell based on Paddy Chayefsky's novel. Chayefsky wrote the screenplay, but since he was displeased with Russell's handling of his material he demanded to be credited as Sidney Aaron, his pen name.

5/5 Judy
  by Judith A. Foley (Sylvania, OH USA)
A very interesting movie. One you really need to pay attention to.

Rent one, and if you like it, I recomend you buy it for you video library.

5/5 Mind-altering!
  by Patrick Moore (Starke, FL USA)
When I was a kid I loved reading the bizarre books by Carlos Casteneda. This movie was actually kind of close to some of Carlos's experiences. One of my stranger favorites.

4/5 Great Imagery
  by OK (Mendon, MA United States)
This movie is one of my favorite as far as the imagery is concerned. The hallucination scenes were way ahead of there time and the whole thing looks and sounds fantastic on my 47" TV.

4/5 The Electric Mushroom Soup Test
  by Tom Hagan (michigan)


I found this film to be an extremely entertaining, interesting and sometimes genuinely surprising. It was going down avenues I wasn't expecting, ala "This man is a F**king gorilla". And there were moments where I found myself slightly creeped out, which is the film's aim.

It's hard to compare this movie to others because there are very few movies like this. "The Fly" comes to mind. As does "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Jacob's Ladder", but only in the sense the creators were so serious in their handling of absurd-far-out material. For these reasons, I give the film big props considering it was released in 1980.

The ending felt a bit rushed and out of tone with the rest of the movie, but this is just a minor complaint. The film was based on a book, so I figured they probably tweaked something for the sake of Hollywood Suits. Overall, I was pleased. Check this one out!