I bet you think I'm freaky yeah?
Last year the famed cult film director Ken Russell passed away. There was an outpouring of grief on Twitter, imdb showed him some love, that was about it really, I don’t think his death got a lot more coverage than a passing mention anywhere else.
Because if you ask the average film fan – by my estimate 98% of the globe – who Ken Russell was, you’ll get either ‘he’s a director isn’t he’ or ‘never heard of him’.
Why? Because Ken Russell made some weird shit. Where Kevin Smith becomes known as a cult director only because he has a lot of fans despite zero critical acclaim, Russell made genuinely cult films. NOT because most of the planet can’t explain why these few die hards support his every cinematic atrocity. (Hi Kev.)
Take Gothic for example. If you were a willing participant in even a portion of the freaky, depraved and frankly sicko stuff that the five main characters get up to over the couple of days you would either be deemed an outcast from society and a disgusting wretch either mentally ill or perhaps even worthy of being locked up.
But if you film this stuff and whack it in a VHS box with a striking cover (look up again, that’s a cool image), you just might get your couple of frames in ‘Dead List’ at this year’s Oscars…
All I know is that for years I shied away from this film because the cover suggested something way too horrifying for me to take on. Now twenty years on I watch it only because the director’s passing brought me momentary inspiration, and I can only repeat my previous assertion that Gothic is some weird shit indeed.
Gothic deals in a weekend at the vast and opulent estate of Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), the poet and writer famed for his prose and isolated due to his… lifestyle. Byron does what he wants, when he wants and usually to whom he wants, even the goat upstairs in his mansion seems to know that. He has a staff of toadying yes-men and a confidence, charisma and reputation that apparently inspires even the more staid to ignore their normal standards and forget their inhibitions.
So when a man shows up that is nearly as nuts as he in the form of Shelley (Julian Sands), and he brings with him two women, one mentally frail and the other suitably impressionable. You’ve got a recipe for an especially debaucherous weekend indeed.
Then the rain starts and they are confined to the indoors in the luxuriously appointed two storey home, adorned with priceless works of art and of course more weird shit – the animatronic near naked Indian dance-puppet springs to mind. The quartet exchange ribald and explicit poetry, then horror stories, then fluids, all topped up with drugs and taboo cocktails. After a time Byron’s resident medical expert shows up, Dr Polidori, who proves to be just as insane and even more desperate than the rest of them.
After a period of time the levels of excess threaten to collapse the psyche of some of the less experienced and more fragile among the party, and imaginations, dreams and nightmares become a little more realistic and lucid. A little too realistic.
And if things weren’t weird enough this is when it gets even freakier.
Gothic isn’t so much a film as a confusing melange of the odd and eccentric. Every now and then the pace slows just long enough for a conversation to break out, only to have it broken up by any of the oddities referenced in this review, or by the breakdown of one of the characters. This makes it harder to follow than a rambling story told by a four year old.
But it is not the story that you will recall after Gothic but the images. The animatronic pianist (yep a different one) with fingers poised perpetually over the keys, the cover image, nipple-eyes.
You heard me.
The actors involved give themselves totally to the crazy material, which must have been draining, and apparently the weekend shown was the inspiration for some of the more famed literary works in history – not least of which was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But if I had to choose it wouldn’t take long, we can keep Frankenstein and the poems and ignore the film. Gothic might be visceral, creative and confronting, but it is hardly required viewing.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. Deserving of its cult status, but this is just another cult I have opted not to join.
