Gothic (1986)

Lake Acid
Considering he's supposed to be `obsessed with the image' Ken Russell's `Gothic' is notable for what it leaves to the imagination. Russell is no tyro-hack, he's seen `the Haunting' and `the Innocents' and knows an in-tune audience will pick up subtle terrors which may or may not be glowering in dark corners, or in the dull recess of a guilty imagination.
Is that a branch scraping the window, or something much more sinister trying to gain access? Russell's anti-thriller gives no answers, even in a rather disquieting epilogue, where the excesses of the previous night are `explained'
Briefly, Don Boyd at Virgin Vision had a literate script on his hands. The core plot had Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, his pregnant lover Claire, and a snide, repressed biographer, Dr. Polidori all spending a Saturday night at a mansion in Geneva.
Now, thought Don, let's see what happens if we give `em loads of drugs, vats of wine, throw in a thunder-storm, a haunting, some scene-stealing goats, and let `em go.
Now who do we get to direct? Hmm...
Russell doesn't disappoint, (he NEVER does, all his films, good or bad, have got something of interest in them) his imagination is at full throttle here. It's a furious and upsetting picture, deliberately so.
You can feel that creepiness as the protagonists decide to hold a séance, to call their darkest fears to exist in this world. Russell has a field day illustrating in detail what a houseful of stoned, tortured geniuses are afraid of in the depths of their debasement, with their guard temporarily down.
One grotesque tableau follows another, but Russell never makes it easy for the rattled viewer. As to what's real and what's not, that's left open, as is the interpretation at the end. Was it all suggestion and hallucination? This reviewer isn't convinced, and Russell's leaving only the vaguest of clues.
It also works on a madcap comedy level. If you sit and think about what you've just watched, you WILL laugh, as with many of Russell's movies.
There are many redolent Russell repulses to rejoice in. A gory stigmata, a make-your-own-mind-up abortion, leeches, rats, incest, slime... In fact, if you can think of it, it's probably here, dowsed in Thomas Dolby's vivid score and competing like crazy with all the other fierce imagery.
There's an attractive funeral pyre sequence as well, filmed in the lake district and involving Shelley. In his autobiography, Russell indicates this is how he would ultimately like to be `disposed' of. Good idea, better than cold earth, hope the weather's good so the 40 piece orchestra, assembled by Melvin Bragg, don't get sodden, as they play Liszt or the Who at full blast!
Performances are good, particularly Gabriel Byrne as `mad' Lord Byron and Natasha Richardson as proto-feminist Mary Shelley (and I'd love to hear the advice mum Vanessa Redgrave gave her about working with Russell. She may proclaim `the Devils' to be her best film, but she never worked with him again!) and I don't think Julian Sands performance as Shelley is as bad as reported either. It's not great by any stretch, but I've seen worse, and he IS playing a highly strung (out!?), self-suffering waif-in-a-storm, zonked out of his literary brains.
`Gothic' isn't Russell's best film, but it is a good one. Compared to the output of most modern Hollywood directors it's a masterpiece. It has wild imagery, some very tender and moving moments, but most of all it has an atmosphere of utter dread, created masterfully by a visionary who knows instinctively how to use light and dark, sound and shadow and Richard Branson's money to make a looney entertainment about some of the worlds most respected and austere literary figures, verbally and physically abusing each other, raising the dead, ripping off their clothes and writhing round in slime.
A Ken Russell film, could it be anything else?

Ken Russell meets mother of Frankenstein - worth seeing
I saw this some twenty years ago, and haven't seen it since. It is a very particular vision of the famous night when Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley spent a night in a country estate in Switzerland and decided to see who wrote the scariest story. Mary Shelley, of course, wrote Frankenstein out of that night. There are other movies on this subject - I think Roger Corman made one. Gothic is what one expects from Ken Russell - lurid, grotesque, hallucinatory, over the top. It hasn't been seen a lot since then, it hasn't become one of his classics, but it is a good film for those who like this sort of thing. And there is the addition of seeing the then young and upcoming English actors playing this - Natasha Richardson (as Mary Shelley), Gabriel Byrne (Lord Byron), Julian Sands (Percy Shelley), Timothy Spall. The scene that have stand most in my memory: Myriam Cyr's nipples turning into eyes.

Scandalously good
I have been fascinated by this film ever since its release in the 1980s, coincidentally at the same time I began a career as a high school literature teacher. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's nightmarish tale of a modern Prometheus, "Frankenstein," is ostensibly the subject of this psychosexual romp by visionary Ken Russel. The viewer is invited along to a risque slumber party with a coven of the Romantic Era's most self-indulgent experimenters in free love, drugs, and the occult. The all-nighter takes place at Gordon Lord Byron's gothic mansion on Lake Geneva (actual location), and features his protege, the gifted and tragic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary, Percy's bride, and a few other messed up friends. According to Mary Shelley's own notes of introduction to her novel, considered by many to be the first and still the best gothic horror story ever written, her motivation to write Frankenstein came as a challenge from these very friends. This group set out during the course of one night to pen the most horrifying tale each could imagine, with the intention of outdoing one another. Mary's inspiration, she later claimed, came in the form of a nightmare, possibly drug-induced. This extended nightmare, and the long night that gave it birth, are the subject of Russel's movie. Strange, disturbing, at times revolting, but ultimately well worth viewing. If only it were less raunchy, I would recommend it to my high school students. But alas, it makes for great college dorm fare.