The Greatest Movie...

... in which the genesis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is born from the laudanum-drenched hallucinations she experiences during an extended exposure to her lover's repressed homosexual relationship with the poet Lord Byron?

Gothic (1986)

I need to share this brief speech that's spoken by Bryon (Gabriel Byrne) to Mr. Shelley (an oft-disrobed Julian Sands at his prettiest; the recently deceased Natasha Richardson is wonderful here in her very first screen role as Mary Shelley) because it delights me:

"Terror has an irresistible beauty, Shelley. Would the smooth neck of a woman be so desirable were it not for our secret wish to see upon it a trickle of blood? Hmm? Forget your women, Shelley, do not waste you brilliant words upon them. Poets are for... each other."

Indeed.

Can I just say that I don't get why the director Ken Russell seems to be from my vantage point so under-appreciated as a filmmaker? Am I missing something? Is there some huge Ken Russell love-fest out there in the world that I haven't caught wind of? I know he's British; is it all over there? Because from what I've seen of Russell's films there ought to be and I don't hear nearly enough about him. Can someone point me in the right direction maybe? Most people don't even seem to know his name. Granted, it's only over the past year or so that my fascinations with him have begun to snowball after finally sitting down and watching the Ken-Russell-gateway-drug that is Altered States (my appreciations for that film can be seen here). From there I went to Lair of the White Worm and Crimes of Passion.


And Gothic now makes just four films from his inestimable filmography (dude is still making movies in his 82nd year of life; he's currently filming Moll Flanders) that I've enjoyed; every single one of these films has completely fascinated me. They're each so lurid and singular and obviously of the same deranged voice... I just really, really dig what he's feeding me, ya know? They're fun and balls-out insane and blessedly not afraid of being completely ridiculous.


Yet... see, the copy of Gothic I came across was on a three-film omnibus disc from Netflix called Psychotic Connections. The other two films are Chiller by Wes Craven and Maniac, a 1934 film by Dwain Esper, and as I've not seen either of these latter titles yet I have no idea why they've been shoveled unceremoniously together onto this DVD together but the quality was abysmal. Just terrible, as if a decades old VHS copy has been filmed with a hand-held recorder. There does appear to be a DVD of Gothic on its own; however, alongside the quest that I've been on to find a good copy of Russell's controversial 1971 film The Devils (I think I maybe succeeded last night, finally, we'll see), this has added up in my mind to a real lack of love aimed at Russell's films. Why aren't there big fancy remastered copies of his films available? He ought to have box-sets, ya know?


I digress. Gothic is a terrific melodramatic swamp of absurdity. If somebody isn't running down a hallway with back-lit curtains flying into their distraught face while they shriek and hallucinate midget-devils perched on their bosoms, then they aren't acting. It's a beautiful thing. I salute you, Ken Russell.

And if anybody wants to tell me what I ought to watch next, do in the comments! Besides The Devils (hopefully, depending on the quality of the copy I found), next will probably be Tommy, I think. But I wanna see all I should, school myself proper-like in all of his wonders.
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