Entry One: Gothic (1986)

Gothic (1986)
Dir: Ken Russell

"Conjure up your deepest, darkest fear...Now call that fear to life."

Ken Russell's an acquired taste, and I've found myself more intrigued by his campy, bombastic, depraved films as I've grown older.  This is his (very loose) interpretation of the story of the famous gathering at Lord Byron's manor that would lead Mary Shelley to write "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus."

On June 16th, 1816, Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), along with his mistress Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson) and her half-sister, Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), calls upon his friend Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), in exile in his manor outside Geneva and being attended by his physician/biographer, John Polidori (Timothy Spall).  Trapped inside by a storm and under the influence of laudanum, the five begin to experience hallucinations while they swap ghost stories.  By the next morning, Mary's experience will leave her with the inspiration for her most famous work.

Gothic is (believe it or not) one of Russell's more restrained works of the 80s, but he still manages to squeeze in most of his major obsessions: neon lights, gratuitous nudity, anti-Catholic imagery, canted camera angles and extreme close-ups.  After the fifteen minute mark, the movie becomes one long hallucination, giving Russell plenty of opportunity to pile on the sleaze: the five engage in various gay-and-straight sex acts, puddles of jizzum appear on the floor, an imp emerges from a painting to menace Richardson, Cyr is ravaged by a sentient suit of armor with a giant metal phallus, a stillborn baby is given a baptism, Sands is alternately buried and burned alive, Cyr's nipples turn into blinking eyeballs and, after a vampiric tryst with Byrne, Spall, as the guilty, Catholic Polidori, rips the crucifix from his wall and recreates the stigmata on his own hands with a rusty nail.  

In the hands of a subtler director, this might be arresting material, but Russell begins the film with the histrionics cranked to 11 and only goes up from there, making it impossible to take any of this seriously (the intrusive, totally anachronistic score by Thomas Dolby only adds to the lunacy).  The cast members are all thoroughly unhinged, but special notice goes to the normally stoic Byrne as Byron, who goes totally off the rails and plays the character like a preening, devious, manipulative rock star.