åIt’s late August of 1978. Four friends are hanging out on the beach. It seems like a perfectly relaxed moment for everyone until a stranger shows-up. She’s an attractive redhead who calls herself Copper. She’s got plans, but they’re not quite going to turn out the way she might expect in Altered States: Purgatori Grindhouse #1. The title character gets an original story courtesy of writer  Ray Fawkes and artist Alvaro Sarraseca. Color comes to the page under the power of Salvatore Aiala. With a story inspired by simplistic supernatural horror, the standalone story serves as an interesting introduction to one of Dynamite Entertainment’s more appealing characters.

Copper was hitchhiking when she ran across a ride to the beach. Jimmy and Tori were sitting there in front of a fire with a couple of other friends. Tori and Jimmy had just started dating. The all-American girl and the burnout who doesn’t deserve her. He doesn’t deserve what comes next either. None of them do. As it turns out, Copper isn’t alone. She and a few others are there too. They’ve got burlap bags on their heads and they answer to some form of evil that has promised power to the chosen.

It’s a bit strange to get a simplified plot of a horror movie compressed into 28 pages. It’s a tight, little delivery of a supernatural slasher film. The script is actually really well-executed for being superficial supernatural horror that doesn’t actually deliver a whole lot of depth to the page. It’s a sharply-constructed adaptation of the type of thing that lived on VHS in local video rental places throughout the 1980s. It’s delivered to the page with such a high degree of fidelity that it feels almost perfect for being what it is. 

Sarraseca has a good eye for layout. It may not be perfectly in the spirit of the slasher horror films that it’s meant to evoke, but there are some rather stylish moments that play out through the pages. The drama might feel slightly under-rendered. The elements of the supernatural might not hit the page with the right level of intensity. The whole thing might feel at least a little bit crude, but Sarraseca brilliantly delivers a mood and that mood is amplified by the coloring work of Aiala. Above all, the title character makes her big transforming in a satisfying series of pages and panels.

Tori becomes Puratori thanks to the mislaid ambitions of a few people and a series of murders. It’s simple stuff, but it definitely makes a powerful impact as the blood flows. No one on the page seems perfectly awware of how jarring everything is. There’s a mixture of listlessness, frustration and blind ambition that keeps everyone from being perfectly aware of the horror surrounding them. The real genius here is that no one involved seems to be reaching for too much. Everyone involved knows exactly what they’re trying to achieve with the stroy and they know exactly how to bind it to the page.

Grade: B-