This week sees the release of The Wave, a new flick that stars Justin Long as a business square who goes out with a friend to celebrate a forthcoming promotion only to get dosed with a powerful psychedelic that completely warps his perceptions. Now he has to get through the night, discover what’s up with a mysterious woman who may or may not be real, and find his damn wallet. Drug trips have been catnip for movie directors for nearly as long as films have been made – they’re a great way to use the power of illusion to illustrate the inside of somebody’s bamboozled brain. We took a double dose and dropped into the vaults to pull out the best drug trips in movie history.
Easy Rider
Let’s kick off with an all-time classic. Dennis Hopper’s road movie is one of the most important counterculture documents of the late 60s, a rambling tale of a pair of bikers riding their hogs from Los Angeles to New Orleans with the cash from a drug deal hidden in one of their gas tanks. On the way, they run into all kinds of people; some friendly, and others less so. Early on they are given some LSD, and once they get to the Big Easy they drop it in the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and have a hell of a harrowing trip with a pair of prostitutes that judders between quick, abstract cuts and winds up with one of the men nestled in the arms of a statue.
Young Guns
This 90s franchise was more known for assembling the decade’s hottest young hunk actors into one franchise, but some historians praised how accurate the Billy the Kid story was. At one point, the three leads head down to Mexico to hide out from a pursuing posse, where they engage in a traditional peyote ritual with a tribal elder. The powerful hallucinogenic has different effects on all the men, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. It manages to be both amusing and unsettling, especially when you blend Kiefer Sutherland’s stoned philosophizing with Dermot Mulroney yelling “Did you guys see the size of that chicken?”
Harvard Man
James Toback’s 2002 comedy-drama is pretty forgettable for the most part – a college basketball player needs to make money to buy his parents a new home, so he agrees to throw an important game for a Mafia boss. When the FBI gets involved, our protagonist accidentally downs a heroic dose of LSD and spends a sizable chunk of time completely losing his mind. CGI morphing effects make the world ooze and undulate around him as his heightened emotional state sends him into a deeply bad trip. It all ends happily, as a friend takes him to a doctor who snaps him out of his psychedelic nightmare.
Skidoo
Otto Preminger’s mostly forgettable 1968 gangster comedy holds a spot on film history lists for its incredibly bizarre and out-of-place LSD sequence. Preminger, a veteran of Hollywood productions since the 1940s, was reaching the end of his storied career when he cast Jackie Gleason as retired hitman Tony Banks. When Banks takes one last job to liquidate an informant behind bars at Alcatraz, he accidentally licks an envelope suffused with LSD and embarks on a trip that involves the floating head of Groucho Marx and other
Altered States
This 1980 Ken Russell joint stars William Hurt in his screen debut as Dr. Edward Jessup, who is studying the effects of sensory deprivation when he makes the extremely poor decision to add psychedelics into the mix. After visiting Mexico, he comes back with a tincture made from the extremely potent Amanita muscaria mushroom and starts taking it while isolated in his light-proof, sound-proof flotation tube. The end results are some of the most horrific, surreal and gruesome sequences of the year, replete with biological horror and religious symbolism. And that’s not even mentioning what happens to Ed when he comes out of the tube.
Mandy
Panos Cosmatos’s wild-ass revenge horror thriller was one of our favorite movies of 2018, an uncompromising and brutal jaunt through madness. When Nicolas Cage’s lumberjack Red Miller goes on a mission to take out the demented cult and their biker army that killed his girlfriend, he ends up accidentally consuming a titanic amount of cocaine mixed with LSD that sends him on an extremely dark trip. His visions do lead him to the Chemist, the man who supplies the bad guys with their extremely pure acid, and from him to the Church of the New Dawn and his ultimate vengeance. The film’s last shot strongly implies that all these substances may have bent Red’s brain permanently, though.
The Big Lebowski
Typically the Dude in the Coen brothers’ cult classic doesn’t go for anything stronger than a White Russian at the bowling alley. But when he’s surreptitiously dosed with an unidentified substance by pornographer Jackie Treehorn, it sends him into a musical reverie that might be the funniest thing on this list. The major elements of the Dude’s life coalesce into a Busby Berkeley-esque fantasia of dancing girls, bowling pins, and smooth moves. It’s a great sequence that might be the most iconic bit in a movie crammed to the gills with iconic bits. We just want to know what was in that cocktail, man.
A Scanner Darkly
Richard Linklater is a dude who is not afraid to push the envelope with his projects – his 2014 film Boyhood was filmed over the course of a dozen years, letting main actor Ellar Coltrane go from six to 18 over the course of the story. He has also experimented with animation, most notably with Waking Life and his 2006 Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly. That movie tells the story of an undercover agent played by Keanu Reeves who trips on the mysterious “Substance D,” and the whole film has us drifting in and out of hallucinations made real by the unsettling rotoscope animation.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
When a director decides to tackle a book previously deemed impossible, they need to move heaven and earth to make it happen. It took decades for Hunter S. Thompson’s manic vision of Sin City on a boatload of drugs to come to the screen, but under the gimlet eye of Terry Gilliam we got one of the most nauseating trips ever lensed. When Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo walk into their Vegas casino, they’re peaking on acid so hard that the hotel bar is populated by fornicating lizard creatures as the walls undulate grotesquely around them. It’s almost difficult to look directly at the screen during the sequence.
Bad Lieutenant
Harvey Keitel uses all sorts of drugs in Abel Ferrara’s exploitation classic Bad Lieutenant, but it isn’t until the very end of the film that it all catches up with him. His brain absolutely melted on heroin, the cop heads into a church to tell a nun who was sexually assaulted that he’s going to kill the men that did that to her. When she requests forgiveness instead, the drug cocktail inside his head incapacitates him, granting him a vision of Christ come off the cross to grant him forgiveness for his many sins. It’s an emotionally harrowing scene that shows how drugs can smash down your inner boundaries, for better or for worse.
Performance
One of the best British films of the 1970s, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s brilliant Performance stars James Fox as a British gangster who goes into hiding after murdering a former friend. He winds up at a country house owned by a rock star (played by Mick Jagger, not much of a stretch) and tries to figure out what he’s going to do with his life. That question is answered by dosing on hallucinogenic mushrooms, which let our hitman experiment with emotional openness. Fox actually dropped Dimethyltryptamine during the production, which explains his striking believability.
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