webmouse3 Gothic is the earlier of the two films on the subject of the 1816 meeting of Shelley, Byron, Polidori and the half-sisters Mary and Claire. Gothic simply seems to lose all its substance underneath overly exaggerated style. I found no reason to like nor to care about the characters, even though the cast is certainly an illustrious and capable one.Haunted Summer gives a much more nuanced look at the lives, loves, and tragedies of these pivotal persons. Gothic has far too much running about in madcap antics with very little focus on what actually drove these people to become who they were -- or to end the way they did. I only own this DVD to use as comparative filmography. As such it is a fine example of how even the most competent actors can not save a film.

LeonLouisRicci Director Ken Russell's Films are Nothing if Not Hallucinatory Hubris, Visually Stunning Excesses of Something Out of a Nightmare or Drug Induced. He Usually Ignores the Winds of Caution and Throws it Out and Makes Some Sensitive Viewers Throw Up, or At Least Throw Up Their Hands.Russell is Not an Easy Take, Not a Friendly Filmmaker and has Many Detractors. This One is No Exception. Bringing to Life, Stillborn Some Say, a Night of Real Life Eccentrics Like Byron Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Dr. Polidori.It is a Wild Weekend with Enough Bizarre Occurrences and Beholding Behavior to Fill a Gothic Novel. Hardly Any of it is Real and Comes from the Fertile Imaginations of the Party Goers. The Cast is Wonderfully Weird with Gabriel Byrne Leading the Pack of Misfits with Timothy Spall, Julian Sands, and Natasha Richardson. Thomas Dolby Provides the Intentionally Anachronistic Score.Overall, There is Nothing Quite Like a Ken Russell Film and His Fans will Probably Adore this One. Others Not So Much. It's Not Made for the Mainstream Who are Quick to Point Out How Much They Hate Him.It's Fascinating, Fun, Horrifying, Disgusting, Decadent, and Delightful. Especially If You Like to Wallow in the World of Drugs and Misanthropic Madness.

jessegehrig Should have been a comedy poking fun at the British class system, instead it's an all too earnest "film" about "important" historical personages. Tries to be dark and mysterious but the movie only achieves hokey and lame. Tries to invoke the heady words wrote by Byron and Shelley but the dialog comes off forced and overly fanciful. All the acting is so operatic, unnatural, rather than adding to character it makes everyone's performance appear hammy. The movie tries to display the free-love orgies Lord Byron and his pals supposedly engaged in, but tragically becomes the funniest part of the film. Just a lot of silly talk, uninspired nudity, and junior-high school haunted house quality horror.

Michael_Elliott Gothic (1986)** (out of 4)Interesting take on how Frankenstein came to be from cult director Russell. The bizarre Byron (Gabriel Byrne) invites friends Shelley (Julian Sands) and his wife Mary (Natasha Richardson) over for what will turn out to be a strange night with one nightmare after another. This British production draws people in as it promises to show how Mary Shelley created her famous story but this here pretty much never happens. I knew enough about the film going in to know not to expect any type of biography or true-story take on the actual events. With that said, this movie is a pretty confusing mess from start to finish and I'm still not quite sure what it was trying to do. Heck, I'm really not sure if Russell knew exactly what they were doing except for trying to create something very bizarre. If the entire plan was to do that then they've pretty much succeeded as this is certainly a very strange movie. The final thirty-minutes goes off-the-wall in terms of weirdness. This is when all the characters really go overboard with one strange fantasy after another, which includes a strange creature living in the castle's basement, dead babies, weird orgies and this here isn't even half of it. We even get a very memorable scene where a woman's nipples are actually her eyes. It's these strange moments that make this film worth viewing but I think most people are going to hit the eject button during the first hour. The first hour is pretty hard to sit through as we basically get our characters going into one long speech after another and when they're not talking they're just screaming at the top of their lungs. The film pretty much left me bored for the first hour and when I wasn't bored I was trying to backtrack to try and make sense of what was going on. There's no doubt Russell has a certain style that he brings to the film and it's atmosphere is right on the mark but you still have to have some sort of plot. Byrne, Sands and Richardson are all fine in their roles.