Bizarre, unearthed “treasure”. Gothic! (***3/10)
More than a century ago, an event that changed literature forever took place at the mansion of the legendary poet, Lord Byron. Other writing luminaries were there, including poet Percy Shelley and his wife-to-be, Mary. The group of writers took lots of hallucinogens, drank a lot, and had a ghost story contest. Many famous works emerged from that night, the most famous of which was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.The movie Gothic, which I found at a gas station for $2.00, attempts to recreate that evening, but it’s such a self-involved pile of crap that nothing gets through. Gabriel Byrne plays Lord Byron as a sadistic narcissist who comes off almost satanic. Too much time is spent explaining the characters – Byron is painted as the evil villain. Percy Shelley is the poor follower who is under Byron’s spell. His girlfriend Mary is the only one sharp enough to know what’s going on. Her sister is taken under the same Lord Byron spell, and is pregnant with his child. Byron’s doctor is there too, and he’s just a weirdo. He is also homosexual, and the movie tries to suggest this makes him even weirder. Not as weird, I would guess, as the others, who all have indiscriminate sex with each other, whether they’re sisters, brothers, men, women OR weirdos.
So we finally get to the movie itself…and there’s no movie. It’s just a series of drug trips which I think are meant to be scary, but they’re just annoying. You have no idea what’s real and what isn’t, but you also don’t care. Toward the end, their drug trips run together, in that they all seem to be having the SAME trip now. It’s just bizarre and weird for the sake of weird. The movie ends on a strange and stuppid note with the smashing of a skull for some reason…and the postscript says something like – “later they actually had the writing contest that we never got to in this movie, and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.”
Freaky but not cool freaky, pointless but not fun pointless, Gothic is to movies what Nazareth’s Morning Dew is to music. Just ignore it and it will go away.