6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
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. Personal horrors are revealed and the madness of the evening runs from sexual fantasy to fiercest nightmare. Mary finds herself drawn into the sick world of her lover Shelley and cousin Claire as Byron leads them all down the dark paths of their souls...
Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Natasha Richardson, Myriam Cyr, Timothy SpallHorror | 100% |
Surreal | 3% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
BDInfo
English SDH, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
The Bride of Frankenstein famously begins with a vignette documenting a “dark and stormy night” (to quote Bulwer Lytton) at the mansion of one Lord Byron, where a number of other leading lights of the Romantic Era like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley have assembled to share what amounts to “campfire” ghost stories, leading to the main tale at the center of this supposed sequel. While this “dramatization” (which is of course slyly comic from the get go) suggests that Mary Shelley had already written Frankenstein and was simply continuing the monster’s saga for the delight and fear factor of her audience, there actually was a historical incident upon which this vignette was based, where Lord Byron, the Shelleys (who were actually not yet married), Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont (who was romantically involved with Byron), and Byron’s personal physician Dr. John William Polidori had assembled at Byron’s magnificent Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It was the summer of 1816, a supposedly temperate time of the year which in fact was wracked with fairly violent storms. The revelers were therefore forced to stay inside, where they did indeed delight each other with scary stories, something that has long been rumored to have given life to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and a somewhat lesser known horror opus, Polidori’s The Vampyre, a story which is now credited as being the first published work in English about such a creature, and one which preceded Bram Stoker’s better remembered Dracula by decades. Ken Russell, a director who was almost genetically programmed not to leave well enough alone, took the fundamental aspects of those epochal historical facts and processed them through his typically hyperbolic sensibilities to create Gothic, one of his more gonzo offerings (which, if you know Russell’s oeuvre, is saying quite a bit). The film is tonally all over the place, and it features a rather staggering array of performance styles, but as with most Russell outings, it’s visually quite alluring, and its slapdash approach toward these iconic characters may appeal to those who like their “history” spiced up with a bit of salacious content.
Gothic is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Film's Vestron Video imprint with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. I have to say to my eyes this is one of the nicer and more consistent offerings we've seen from the Vestron Video collection, one that has a nicely suffused palette almost all of the time and which offers generally very good to excellent detail levels. There are a few niggling issues along the way, including some easily perceptible wobble during the credits (where some might want to also keep their eyes peeled toward the bottom left of the frame, where a few errant white specks show up). Later in some kind of misty (if interior) scenes, there are slight compression issues where the otherwise organic looking grain field tends to clump just a little. A few isolated scenes are a bit rougher and less clear than the bulk of the presentation, but my sense is these issues are source related, not a fault of the encode.
Gothic features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix which provides ample support for the film's dialogue and its somewhat anachronistic score by Thomas Dolby. Dolby's music was actually one of the film's calling cards at the time of its original release, but I have to say I've always thought it kind of draws attention to itself rather than subliminally supporting the scenes it's featured in. (There are a ton of Dolby fans I'm sure would vehemently disagree with me.) Fidelity is fine throughout the presentation, and there are no problems of any kind to report.
One of my all time favorite Peanuts cartoons featured Snoopy attempting to write a novel, which he began with Bulwer-Lytton's infamous, "It was a dark and stormy night." Resident critic (ahem) Lucy walks in and berates Snoopy for his stupidity, pointing out that a book needs to start with an instantly alluring character. Snoopy thinks for a moment and then types, "He was a dark and stormy knight." There actually is a knight in Gothic, lest you were wondering, along with everything else (including a kitchen sink, I imagine), and like a lot of Russell films, there's kind of an enjoyable delirium that accrues simply due to all the excesses on display. But Gothic doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, and as such it's kind of an odd entry in Russell's already pretty outré filmography. Technical merits are generally strong and the supplementary package enjoyable for those considering a purchase.
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