The Incomparable Altered States

Here's another Ken Russell oddity.  In fact, it may go down in the history books as Ken Russell's most famously weird film, but I don't think it's quite that.  It's certainly trippy, literally, and filled with strange science fiction notions.  But it's based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, and this material takes great pains to convince you that the sci-fi you see in this film is entirely possible, if not the author's genuine beliefs.  Sure, it's an excuse for the director of the far-out imagery of Tommy to depict drug-induced hallucinations and other craziness, bur at the end of the day, it doesn't feel as unpredictably crazy and unhinged as Lisztomania or The Fall of the Louse of Usher.  Russell's actually quite grounded here.  But still, if you want some heady, serious yet mind-bending science fiction, this one still holds up better than most of what we get today.

Update 5/9/17 - 11/30/25: This update has been long-awaited!  A Criterion release of Altered States has been rumored since a Criterion branded image leaked onto the net in 2018.  I even mentioned it to them in an email exchange, but of course they just replied with a coy, "As far as ALTERED STATES, I haven't heard of a planned release but that would be awesome!"  Well, it's here now and it is awesome.  The fact that they waited until 2025 means we get a proper 4k restoration on UHD, which is definitely worth it.

William Hurt, in his film debut, lends a lot of credibility to his role as a university researcher determined to pierce the mysteries of the human consciousness.  In classic Hollywood fashion, he experiments on himself, with sensory deprivation tanks and hallucinogenic drugs, attempting to unlock the hidden chambers of the brain and access a collective memory or an "original self."  It's all well and good, until he finds it's not something one can just pop in and out of, and he starts to become a danger to his family and coworkers (Drew Barrymore, the great Bob Balaban, Molly Dodd's Blair Brown and John Larroquette) as his body begins to follow his mind and he physically devolves. 

Did I mention that Hurt lends a lot of credibility to this film?  Because boy does he.  There's a lot of weight on his shoulders.  I enjoy this film because it's smart, and it's a treat when Russell finally gets to cut loose with his visual depictions of drug-induced visions.  But it never really crosses the line for me into becoming a great film, because it fails to pay off it's heady set-up.  You feel like you're being led to some kind of ingenious, thrilling spectacle, but instead just wind up in typical, B-movie mad-scientist-on-the-loose territory, a la Bela Lugosi's The Ape Man or Kevin Bacon's Hollow Man.  It's got terrific production values, some strong moments and the actors keeps your eyes on the screen the entire time.  But the conclusion's pretty pedestrian.

Still, for being such a highly regarded and famous science fiction film, it sure has an underwhelming history on home video.  Warner Bros originally released it on DVD in 2000 as a flipper disc in a crapper snapper case.  And then they released it as a barebones blu in 2012.  You know, when Warner Bros doesn't want to prioritize something, they can keep a film's home video life pretty bland.  But thankfully, Criterion has rescued it in 2025, giving it a fancy new special edition 4k BD/ UHD combopack.

1) 2000 WB DVD widescreen side; 2) 2000 WB DVD fullscreen side;
3) 2012 WB BD; 4) 2025 Criterion BD; 5) 2025 Criterion UHD.

Well, the DVD looks pretty good for being so old.  It's anamorphic widescreen, not interlaced.  Both widescreen versions are 1.78:1, because of course they chose "no black bars" over a more accurate 1.85:1.  And the fullscreen version is naturally 1.33:1, opening up some of the top and bottom while chopping off some of the left and right.  Obviously that version's for curiosity seekers only.  At least the BD cleaned up some of the damage from the DVD's footage (look at the scratches and dirt on the mushroom cloud), but they seem to have scrubbed away fine detail in the process.  At first I thought the DVD might actually be more detailed than the blu, but no.  Taking a closer look (check out the grate on the top left of the inner chamber in the second set of shots), the blu pulls out a little more, and it's certainly safe from the compression smudges and edge enhancement of an old standard def transfer. 

But now we get an all new 4k restoration taken from the original camera negative, and starting with the most obvious, yeah, we finally get a correct 1.85:1, which is essentially the same framing as the 2012 with the extra matting.  Film grain actually looks soft, like they applied a little DNR to the image, but it's still obviously a better capture than what came before.  And the colors are the most improved, even on the BD, but especially on the Dolby Vision HDR UHD.  And this is a movie where the spectacle of color really counts, including the separation.  Like, that mushroom cloud is a much more robust red on the 2025 release, but then when you look at the ground, it's less red and more natural.  So could this look even better?  Probably, but it's a big, very welcome, step forward.

So the DVD gave us a 5.1 audio track, plus a French dub, with English and French subtitles.  The 2012 blu replaces the French dub with a Spanish one and gives us the 5.1 English in DTS-HD, plus English, French and Spanish subs.  So not bad, but Criterion is the first to finally give us the original 2.0 surround audio.  There are no foreign options, but we get that 2.0 plus the same 5.1 remix (both in DTS-HD) from the old blu, and optional English HoH subs.  So it's another easy decision.

And that goes for special features, too, because, everything up to now's been pretty barebones.  The DVD has a trailer and 2 TV spots, plus some bonus trailers.  What's fun, at least, is that even the trailers are wide on the widescreen side and fullscreen on the reverse.  The blu-ray doesn't even keep the TV spots, having just the trailer.  It's a shame Criterion waited so long to tackle this, since we missed out chance to bring in Ken Russell while he was still alive.  For a long time there, Russell was recording commentaries for everything from Lair Of the White Worm to Salome's Last Dance, but Warner Bros couldn't get him for Altered frikken' States?  That's just neglect.

But Criterion tries their best to make up for lost time.  There's an expert commentary by Samm Deighan, which is pretty good.  She starts to run out of steam in the last act, and she falls into the "reading everybody's imdb page" trap; but for the most part, she's got a lot of great info to share and adds a lot of value.  Even better, we get two vintage interviews.  The first is with Russell himself.  It's an entire TV program, but it is focused on him promoting Altered States and he answers some questions fans will have.  Then there's a great interview with William Hurt from 2019 - the only complaint I have about this one is I wish it went on longer, because he's got some stories!  And finally, there's a brand new interview with Bran Ferren who did all the crazy optical effects - essentially everything except the direct make-up effects Dick Smith had created.  They also have the trailer, plus a fold out insert with an essay by critic Jessica Kiang.

So I'm so glad we have something better than Warner's blu of Altered States.  Sure, it did in lieu of anything else.  But now we've finally got an exciting reason to upgrade from the DVD.  Because this movie is too big, in every respect, to languish in barebones budget discs.

Ken Russell's Best Tommy

The first thing you need to know about Tommy is that you don't have to give a crap about rock & roll or The Who to enjoy it. Yeah, it's a musical of their work, and if you're a big fan, obviously there'll be that extra appeal. But it's a Ken Russell movie. It's one of the craziest Ken Russell movies, which you know is really saying something if you're familiar with Ken Russell films. It's a big, bombastic visual roadshow, with a fascinating, dark undercurrent.

Update 5/9/17: I've gone back and added the original, 1999 US DVD.  Not only does it provide a nice bit of history to this post, but shows us a little something new, as it includes a fullscreen version.

Update 8/16/24: So, we looked at the US barebones DVD, the UK special edition DVD and the US blu-ray... Wouldn't it be great if there was a release that combined the best of both worlds: HD quality and all the UK extras?  Well, there is!  It's Update Week 2024 Day 3, and today I've also updated the pages for A Room With a View and Shoah with the Criterion DVDs I'd glossed over by jumping right to the Criterion blus.

Ken Russell has said he wasn't familiar with The Who or Tommy (it was a rock opera album years before it was a film) when he was approached to make the film. But not only did he like it when he listened to it, but he realized it had a lot in common with The Angels, a script about false religion he'd written to follow The Devils, but was unable to get funded. So this would be a sort of way to make that movie while still being able to be more faithful to the story of all the album than most previous attempts to turn it into a screenplay had been by other writers. So things just sort of dovetailed nicely into an adaptation that could deeply satisfy The Who and their fans, while still being unquestionably a Ken Russell film. After all, breaking boundaries between music and film was more than half of this guy's career.

So we meet Tommy as a young boy. His father, Robert Powell, goes off to war (originally WWI, but updated to WWII in the film), and his mother Ann-Margaret has an affair with Russell regular Oliver Reed. When Powell returns home, they kill him in front of the boy and he goes blind, def and dumb. Cut to a decade later and of course the boy grows up to be Roger Daltry.  He's abused and neglected, drugged and taken advantage of all his life - even psychiatrist Jack Nicholson can't help him - until it turns out he has an inexplicable gift for breaking records at pinball. He becomes a celebrity and even a sort of youth culture messiah, but obviously that can't work out for long.

Giving Russell a massive rock star budget lets him return with unparalleled spectacle. And I'm not a rock and roll guy, but even I have to admit the music's pretty good. I mean, when Tina Turner sings "The Acid Queen?" Come on! But beyond all that, the performances, even though they're all sung and often highly exaggerated, are quite good (Ann-Margaret was nominated for an Academy Award for this, after all) and the story is genuinely involving. This movie is super 70s, and got a lot of mileage out of simply being an epic music video before music videos existed. Nothing like it would fly today. But at the same time, if you love cinema, it holds up completely and shouldn't be missed.

So Tommy first hit DVD in 1999, and even Superbit DVD in 2002, both via Columbia Tri-Star. But those were disappointingly absent any features, and the one to own became the British Prism Leisure import from 2004, because it was a brilliant 2-disc special edition. And then the next noteworthy release was in 2010, when Sony brought it up to HD on blu-ray.  But it was barebones again. Grrr.  Fortunately, UK label Odeon came out with their own blu-ray, which included the Prism Leisure extras, now properly coupled with an HD transfer.

1999 Columbia widescreen DVD first; 1999 Columbia fullscreen DVD second;
2004 Prism Leisure DVD third; 2010 Sony BD fourth; 2013 Odeon BD fifth.

Well, say what you will, Sony really gave us a nice image with their blu. The UK DVD looked pretty good: anamorphic, un-interlaced, strong colors, 1.85 framing. It was a good DVD. Though surprisingly, the older US DVD, despite being from the 90s, actually looks a bit better, with cleaner lines and more precise colors.  But Sony does more than just present the same transfer on a less compressed blu-ray disc. The image is much sharper and cleaner, with more natural colors and clearer detail. The framing is slightly different, still 1.85:1, but the blu is pointed a little lower, with a bit more picture on the bottom, while the DVDs have a bit more on the top. I can't say one is really better than the other in that regard, but they're different so I'm pointing it out.  Oh, and of course the fullscreen DVD has a lot more on the tops and bottoms.  It's almost entirely open matte, just losing a little on the sides.  But of course 1.85:1 is the proper composition.

As for the Odeon blu, it's virtually identical to Sony's.  They're clearly using the same master.  Zooming in way close, though, the grain is a smidgen softer in places, which I'd put down to compression.  You'll never see the difference in motion, but technically Sony comes out a tiny step ahead.

Both DVDs have a Dolby stereo track and a 5.1 mix. Audio is especially important in a musical, after all. And Sony appreciated this as well, giving us DTS-HD master tracks for the 5.1 mix, and a 5.0 Quintophonic Sounds mix. "Quintophonic Sounds" was a special 4-way stereo mix designed for this film.  Anyway, Odeon has both tracks in DTS-HD, too, and each release also includes optional English subtitles.

But yeah, for whatever reason, Sony didn't carry over any of Prism's extras. They don't even have the trailer, just a couple of random bonus trailers.

Well, the UK discs do have the trailer, but that's nothing. They start out with a Ken Russell commentary. He always did great commentaries, and he delivers a great conversation here alongside moderator and famous British film critic Mark Kermode. This alone is a treasure, and it's crazy to think it never made it to the US, but anyway. Russell also has a nice on-camera interview. Ann-Margaret, Roger Daltry and composer Pete Townshend also give fun on-camera interviews, and they're some pretty big gets! Finally, there's The Story Of the Sound, which is a terrific twenty-minute feature on the Tommy's Quintaphonic sound, including interviews with the film's dubbing mixer Ray Merrin, music editor Terry Rawlings and Robin O'Donoghue, head of sound at Shepperton Studios. Well, technically there's one more extra on the DVDs: a 20-minute "Press Promo,' which is a sort of an advertisement featurette, combining clips from the film and the interviews already on this disc. There's no new content, so it's just as well Odeon didn't bother with it.

Instead, they have an extra, albeit brief, television interview with Russell that even Prism Leisure doesn't include and is easily preferable. The 2-DVD set does also come in a nice slip-sleeve and includes an exclusive 12-page booklet with vintage posters, cards, notes by Matt Kent and an essay by Pete Townshend, though.  But I'll always take proper video content over swag.

Odeon's exclusive interview.

So for years, most serious fans had both the UK set and the US blu - one for the extras and the latter for the superior presentation of the film. That's still a winning combo today. But if you don't already have both and are deciding what to pick up today, the Odeon's the clear way to go.  At least until UHDs start coming out, which feels somewhat likely.  But if just Sony does it in the US, they still probably won't have the extras, so the Odeon feels like a fairly safe investment.

I Love The Music Lovers

For a while there, we were getting Ken Russell films on blu-ray fast and furious.  Then it slowly petered out.  But the BFI is back with another HD debut, 1971's The Music Lovers.  Hopefully, it's not a one-off.  I'd love to see blus of Dance Of the Seven Veils, Lisztomania, Savage Messiah, Salome's Last Dance, Lady Chatterley, Mind Bender and of course The Devils.  In Search Of the English Folk Song would be fun, too, and maybe a collection of his early BBC shorts.  But this is a major one off the wish list.

The Music Lovers is one of Russell's best composer films, possibly the best, which is really saying something.  Specifically, this one's about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, played by Richard Chamberland.  The great Glenda Jackson plays his troubled wife and Russell regular Christopher Gable plays his DL gay lover.  Yes, this is a surprisingly progressive story for 1971, and yes, Russell does present us with a supremely English Russia, though he does a nice job capturing some of the proper architecture in his sets.  Look for Bruce Robinson, writer and director of Withnail & I and The Killing Fields, in a supporting role.  It's at times one of Russell's more grounded theatrical ventures, but at other times it goes as colorfully bombastic as you can imagine.  And as always, one of the film's greatest strengths in Russell's ability to invoke imagery to match the maestro's composition, and to intuitively sync the man's biography with his work.

In the US, all we got was a barebones DVDR from MGM in 2011, which was better than nothing at least.  The UK got almost the exact same disc from Final Cut Entertainment that same year, but at least it was a properly pressed DVD.  The back of its case it's "4:3 Full Frame," but fortunately no, it's properly 16x9 2.37:1.  That's been my go-to disc until now, as the BFI has just released a brand new, special edition blu-ray.

2011 Final Cut DVD top; 2024 BFI BD top.

The BFI booklet's "About the Presentation" page only says that they got the master from MGM, so I'm guessing this isn't a fresh new 2 or 4k scan, or they'd tell us so.  Still, it's clearly a newer master than the DVD.  The colors are better separated and the framing has been refined to a more precise 2.35:1. 
Film grain is light when it's present at all, and the edges look a little tweaked (some of those highlights seem overly cranked), again suggesting an older HD master, but it's certainly clearer than the DVD (which has worse edge enhancement) with more vibrant colors and a generally satisfying image, albeit nothing cutting edge.

Final Cut's DVD just has the original 2.0 stereo track.  BFI upgrades that track to LPCM and throws in a "bonus" DTS-HD 5.1 mix.  The blu-ray also includes optional English subtitles, which the DVD does not.

Our special edition starts off with an audio commentary by film historian Matthew Melia, and its rather excellent.  I think we've been getting burned more and more by modern "experts" who take a very lazy approach to commentaries, where they come with only a few basic facts and just wing it for two hours, wandering off into tangents about their childhoods, unrelated films or whatever springs to mind in their free associations.  This, on the other hand, is a nice reminder of the value of a real expert who's prepared and here to inform.  Then there's a vintage, audio-only interview from 1988 with screenwriter Melvyn Bragg, which also plays as a second commentary over the film.  Unfortunately, he doesn't mention The Music Lovers once, and only takes one question near the end about his work as a screenwriter at all (where he talks about his disappointment with his 1968 film Isadora being shorn of approximately thirty minutes).  Instead it's all about his years producing The South Bank Show, which is still somewhat interesting, at least if you've ever seen the show. But unlike the Melia commentary, I'd only recommend listening to it if you're familiar with his that program.

Besides those, though, we get plenty more goodies.  First is an amusing interview with Russell's son, who talks about working as an extra in this and other of his father's films, plus his frustrations with The Fall Of the Louse Of Usher.  Then there's a short film of Ken Russell's strange, original ballet Charlotte Brontë Enters the Big Brother House (the story of Brontë's life as told through the prism of the reality show Big Brother).  The film consists of a behind-the-scenes 'making of' followed by the entire ballet itself, edited for film.  Those are the treats.  Then, for more serious Tchaikovsky fans, we get three 1950s newsreels about him and a brief 1940 film of an excerpt from Swan Lake.  There's also a stills gallery of costume designs, the theatrical trailer and a 40-page booklet.  In short, it's another must-have in Russell's filmography on home video.  Let's hope BFI never stops pumping out releases like this.

Must-Have Mahler

It's been a while since we've tackled a Ken Russell film here at DVDExotica, and I've been sitting on a doozy.  Mahler is from 1974, and yes it's another one of his surprisingly vast number of films about famous composers.  And hey, I love all of Russell's eras, but the 70's is really the peak, where he's got the budgets and the creative freedom to fully live up to his imagination.  Mahler is definitely taking full advantage.  And while there's only been one old, cruddy DVD released in the United States, there have been far superior, underappreciated editions overseas... just the sort of thing this site was born to tell you all about.

Mahler is one of the later composer biopics, so it's not quite as out there as Lisztomania or Dance Of the Seven Veils, but it's sure not one of his staid BBC documentaries.  I mean, you do see that sexy SS officer nailed to a burning cross on the DVD cover up there, don't you?  This film comes out swinging, with a small cottage by the sea bursting into flames.  It's the beginning of one of Russell's brief, impressionistic interpretations of Gustav Mahler's life and music.  Then it settles into more of a traditional biopic, framed by a deathly ill Robert Powell (Harlequin, Tommy) on a train to Vienna, where he encounters people from his life who trigger a series of flashbacks.  Cinematically, the device might read as a bit trite, but it really doesn't matter here, with Russell and Powell using it collaborate on a fascinating characterization, uniquely exploring the man's life and work even when it isn't producing more of Russell's signature prototypical music videos set to Mahler's greatest compositions.

Mahler originally came out as a barren, full-screen DVD from Image back in 1998.  Fremantle released a similar UK edition in 2005; but eventually word got around that the smart move was to import a later reissue from Odeon Entertainment, which had the anamorphic widescreen version.  But that's old news now.  We're in the HD era, and Paramount themselves have come out with a proper blu-ray edition, but only in Japan.  It's been available since 2012, actually the same year the Odeon came out, and there's been no sign of a Western release, so we have to import.  Luckily, it's completely English friendly.

2012 Odeon DVD top; 2012 Paramount BD bottom.

Coming out, as they did, in the same year, one might expect the Odeon and Paramount discs to have the same master, one just given a higher resolution disc.  But no, these aren't even in the same aspect ratio.  The DVD is 1.77:1 and as I said, anamorphic.  It's also non-interlaced and a rather satisfying DVD for its time.  But it's still a very scrunchy image, which is to say ruffled all over by messy compression artifacts and aching for a clearer HD image.  And we get it.  Now framed at 1.66:1, revealing substantially more picture around all four images, Paramount's version is infinitely cleaner, with finer lines and far more lifelike detail and colors.  Admittedly, grain is a little light and inconsistent - this is a 2012 BD, after all, not a modern 4k job - but wow, it's a whole different world compared to the DVD.  Print damage (like the black spot over the boy's cap in the first set of shots) has been cleaned up on the blu, too.  Clearly a full-on remaster was done, which Odeon was not let in on.

Both discs offer the original stereo track, but it's in lossless LPCM on the blu.  Neither offer any subtitles, unfortunately, though the blu does throw in an equally lossless Japanese dub for its native buyers.  There are no special features on these or any releases of Mahler except the fullscreen trailer, which is included on both the discs we're looking at today.  Everyone really ought to be region free, but this is region A anyway, and it belongs in more people's collections.