Gothic (1987)

Memorable, crazy movie

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

A fictional telling of an event that happened in Switzerland in 1816. Five friends were on vacation--Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), Shelley (Julian Sands), his wife Mary (Natasha Richardson), Mary's half-sister Claire (Miriam Cyr) and Dr. Polidori (Timothy Spall). Unfortunately it rained every day of their vacation. To entertain themselves they told horror stories and each decided they would write their own horror stories. Only two finished--Polidori wrote "The Vampyre" and Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein". According to this film they were all on drugs and spend a dark and stormy night in a HUGE house confronting their deepest darkest fears.For Russell this is restrained. There's plenty of drug-induced imagery, female AND male nudity (courtesy of Sands) and lots of screaming and running around. It makes sense (sort of) but it's out there. There's one serious casting error--Byrne. He's terrible as Byron but the rest of the cast is good--especially Richardson and Sands. A pretty good Ken Russell film that has been forgotten. I give it a 7.

Historical accuracy moves over to make room for dramatic license in this extremely bizarre "re-imagining" of the weekend Mary Shelley first brought "Frankenstein" to life (as it were!). Although, to be fair, there isn't too much about the novel at all.Byron (Gabriel Byrne) invites Mary, her then future husband Percy (Julian Sands) and her cousin Claire to spend the weekend with himself and another friend of his, Dr Pollidore (who also went on to write a Gothic horror) at his estate in Geneva. After much drug-fuelled recourse, dodgy parlour games and sexually liberated liaisons it becomes apparent that the ever omni-sexual Byron has questionable motives and is basically trying to fire-in to all the guests! This brings about an adequate amount of paranoia,jealousy and arguing amongst everyone which inevitably turns into soul-seeking, psychotic breakdowns and eventual emotional ennui. Presumably it is in this state Shelley went on to put pen to paper.The cast are solid in their roles and Byrne is thoroughly convincing as the foppish predator. Russell delivers this movie with complete frankness and is somewhat mercenary in his reshaping of the facts to suit his own ends. Never one to shirk from the difficult often shocking subjects, he manages to turn an otherwise average script into a sexually charged hallucinogenic nightmare. While not exactly deserving of the "horror" label it has been tagged with, "Gothic" is an interesting foray into the dark abyss of the director's mind.

Ken Russell's "Gothic" has a title both redolent of itself and the literary genre whose birth it charts. The renowned English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julia Sands), his soon-to-be wife Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson), and Mary's highly-strung stepsister Claire Clairmont (Miriam Cyr) travel to the Villa Diodati in Switzerland to be house-guests of the infamous exile Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) and his fawning physician Dr John Polidori (Timothy Spall). After an evening of excess imbibing laudanum and reading ghost stories to combat the boredom due to being kept inside by a lightning storm, all five denizens of this house of horrors (the Universal-esque title "House of Byron" would have been just as apt) must contend with nightmarish hallucinations and come face to face with their innermost terrors.As a literary biopic, viewers may find Russell's trademark auteur-ial flourishes offputting, but they are well suited to the subject matter and the larger than life grotesqueries of the characters themselves. Gabriel Byrne portrays the club-footed and lascivious Byron with great relish, and is reminiscent of the gentlemen who essayed the role in the opening prologue to "The Bride of Frankenstein". Spall is twitchy and nervy as Polidori, barely suppressing his homosexual lust for his devilish master, and conflicted with the Catholic upbringing that teaches him such feelings are evil. Polidori would come to chart his leanings, and his tortured feelings for Byron, in "The Vampyre": in which the Western world's first literary bloodsucker Lord Ruthven is a thinly-veiled portrait of the poet.Julian Sands (the "Warlock" himself!) and Miriam Cyr give a good acquittal of themselves as a soppy and foppish Shelley and the hysterical Claire respectively, but the showpiece of the film is in my opinion the performance of the late Natasha Richardson as the nascent Mary Shelley, whose nightmares of her stillborn child and yearning to bring it back to life give birth (pun intended) to the legend of "Frankenstein". The sequence in which Mary sees a grotesque version of herself - looking spookily like Erica Blanc's succubus from "The Devil's Nightmare" - nursing a baby's skeleton in a crib stayed with me for a long, long time (perhaps i shouldn't have been watching this at eight years old..?).

Fierce and flamboyant film director Ken Russell takes the viewer for a weekend in the country with some literary notables in Gothic, a nightmarish orgy of blood and thunder based in fact. It is nothing new for Russell who unlike like any other director took factual historic accounts of lives of the famous (Mahler, Tchaicovsky, Isadora Duncan) and applied audacious compositions that some might say bordered on character assassination. Given Byron's temperament I'm sure he would have approved.Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) has the poet Shelly (Julian Sands) , wife Mary (Natacha Richardson), and half sister sometime lover Claire down to the Villa for a weekend of sadistic parlor games challenging the status quo and their sanity with ungoverned imagination and confession. Accomodated by a violent storm the five scurry wildly from room to room to roof hallucinating and acting out monstrously. The weekend is framed between two eras fitted into brief prologue and epilogue, centuries apart with inquisitive tourists checking out the grounds and listening to the same gossipy chatter of the guide. Within this framework we are barraged with relentless scenes of shock and awe as each character confronts and is confronted with mean spiritedness and cruel reality. Russell in typical form offers up some incredibly potent imagery with copious amounts of blood and sexual depravity as well as appearances by living gargoyles and leeches. He allows no respite between opening and finale as the dark humor he skillfully applies in other films is so dark as to be invisible here. Byrne provides the character of Byron with a a perverse twinkle in his eye while half sis Claire played by Myriam Cyr remains semi demonic throughout. Sands idealistic Shelley counterpoints Byron nicely and Natascha Richardson brings a balance and touch of sanity to the group as Mary Shelly, even as she endures a night of terror and memory. Fifth wheel Dr. Polidori played by Timothy Sprall conveys a magnificent repugnance. With Byron's well documented esoteric lifestyle and the fact that Mary Shelley claims to have been inspired on this night to write the book Frankenstein Russell's wild style is a good fit to fill in blanks. Watching it for some may be an ordeal but I'm sure Lord Byron would have been impressed with Ken's kindred spirit.