Rating: 3/5
Hooptober X | 22/34 | Ken Russell | Decades 7/8 | 80s
The film is a fictionalized telling of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley visiting Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati. During that time, the household drops acid and has a horror writing competition. Though fiction, we know one truth from this: Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
The film performs a cartoonish sadism that seeks to provoke like The Devils in a world akin to Lisztomania. Instead, it takes the Romantic setting and paints a drug-induced orgy of images that, while striking, doesn’t add up to a compelling story.
Thomas Dolby’s soundtrack is 80s pulp synth.
This is the earliest Timothy Spall role I’ve seen. He’s kookie as hell.
Myriam Cyr has permanent acid eyes.
We get to see Julian Sands’s ass.
It’s a little gay — Byron and Shelley share some intimate moments, but nothing substantial.
It features one of my favorite paintings, Fuseli’s The Nightmare — I love that spooky horse peaking from the curtains.
By the end, it gets really wild, and I can appreciate it for that.