Watch Gothic For Free

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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.

No wonder that a lot of reviewers didn't like the movie. This Ken Russell's interpretation of that famous summer nights in 1816 is quite unusual...but it has sense to me.We have to keep in mind the turbulent times in which these people lived (Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont), full of war conflicts, loss of family members (Mary Shelly lost 3 of her children), important economics debts...It is therefore not surprising that this issues leads them to visit Lord Byron in Villa Diodati (Lake Geneva, Switzerland) and release their worrying state of mind reading and writing horror stories.The movie is an hallucinatory trip through fantasy, mystery, literature, eroticism, visions...all spiced with psychedelic moods. Music, camera and photography are set in terms to increase this perception.Not for everyone.Just for open-minded movie goers8/10

Story of the night that Mary Shelley gave birth to the horror classic "Frankenstein." Disturbed drug induced games are played and ghost stories are told one rainy night at the mad Lord Byron's country estate.When you have a horror film directed by Ken Russell, starring Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron, Julian Sands as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley, you expect a certain level of quality, or at least entertainment. And I think this more or less hit those marks.For me, the most troublesome part was the poor quality DVD. Maybe there are good ones and bad ones, but the one I had was pretty fuzzy -- not unlike a VHS transfer. This is the sort of title that Shout Factory could do wonders with.

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..?).