This month at the ReelChange Drive In, travel with us, if you will, to those thrilling days of yesteryear! The year is 1980, and the baby boomers are guiltily trading in their love beads for gold watches and the flaky V on their Ws for a solid BM. With this unexpected but inevitable selling out comes even more introspection from America's most self-involved generation. So what do you get when you mix a generation raised on cheap drugs with enough money and time for too much therapy? This month's double feature.

We start the evening with an elusive oddity, Lathe of Heaven. Bruce Davidson plays George Orr, a man who may have the power to change the very essence of reality with his dreams. Kevin Conway is the shrink assigned to the case after George ODs trying to stop dreaming. The picture starts with a nicely understated dystopian feel, which goes through some interesting evolutions as George's therapy gets out of hand.

Due to some copyright issues over a Beatles song, Lathe has been virtually unseen in the time since it was originally aired on PBS back in '80. It's an interesting film even with its dubious effects. It reminds us that science fiction doesn't always have to revolve around outer space dogfights and intergalactic treaties. Advances in artificial intelligence have often made for some great sci-fi, but why are there so few about advances in the real thing?

Our second feature of the evening is from the often hateable, but never uninteresting Ken Russell. It's another hippie/yuppie psy-fi brainmelt, a little something called Altered States. The picture concerns a professor who, in good old-fashioned mad-scientist fashion, becomes too personally involved in his own research. William Hurt plays the professor obsessed with mixing the mind-expanding experiences of crazy Indian peyote and an old sensory depravation tank. As his trips become more and more intense, he begins to believe that he may be devolving to something not-quite-human.

From a novel by the estimable Paddy Chayefsky, the story is taken to such extents by the the ever-unrestrained Mr. Russell that Mr. Chayefsky disowned the film, but don't let that scare you off. This isn't just a trip picture; this is the ultimate bad trip picture. It certainly owes a debt or two to Dr. Jekyll, and even more to Mr. Hyde, but at the same time it exists out there on its own. The end is a little abrupt and obtuse, but maybe that's because I'm not taking into account the unavoidable flashbacks cinematic dope this nasty will inevitably trigger.

So join us for a night of mindfucks and mean trips: both from 1980, both from the most insecure generation of self-satisfied self-made heirs. Were they conflicted? Yes. Contradictory? Yes—but often out of that opposition comes interesting, if not truly great, films.

Special late feature: Videodrome