Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Rainey Dawn Well, I don't believe anyone can actually say what happened the night Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein - and I DON'T believe it's what happened in this bizarre film. Looking at through the eyes of "it's just Hollywood cinema" it's an entertaining horror film.Drugs and alcohol?... well I'm not sure that is what spawned Mary Shelley's book. I tend to think the fact she knew people in 'high places' and overheard some amazing conversation about the future of medical science is what spawned her imagination and the book Frankenstein. Intellectual conversations are the likely reason for the book.Over all, this is good, fun horror film, even though I highly doubt it's accuracy. It is quite possible that drugs and alcohol did play a small role but I can't say for sure but I can say it made for an entertaining horror film.8/10

micro-cotton Mad, bad and dangerous to know, was used as a description for Lord Byron, one of the main protagonists in this wonderfully bizarre film from Ken Russell. The description could have been equally applied to Russell, who directs this tale based on the conception of The Frankenstein novel during a laudanum enhanced visit to Byron's continental home, by Mary Shelley and her brother PB Shelley. Visually it is stunning and the soundtrack by Thomas Dolby is one of my favourites. Ken Russell was one of the true mavericks of British Cinema,who pulled no punches, so I can appreciate that he is very much like marmite. I would say this is one of his better films that will stand the test of time.

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.

Glen McCulla 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..?).