Review of 'Gothic'

Inspired by watching the National Theatre's production of Frankenstein online last week, I thought I'd watch some of the films about how it came to be written - the famous afternoon on Lake Geneva with Byron, Shelley, Dr Polidori and Mary Godwin holed up in a villa by the bad weather, and having a competition to write ghost stories. About a year ago I watched a biopic of Mary Shelley, which covers this along with her subsequent difficulties in becoming a published writer, and I said it was decent enough but I wasn't sure that it was necessary. I actually said that this story had been covered before in Ken Russel's Gothic.

Well, I must have thought I'd watched Gothic, but I couldn't have, because I wouldn't have forgotten it, and I would never, never, have decided to watch it a second time. It's not often I give up watching a film before the end, but I turned this off at the 53rd minute - it was at once boring and disgusting. It's tediously trying to shock all the time, it's not very interesting to look at, there's an abysmal score that would have disgraced a Hammer Horror film. Misogynistic in the relish it takes at the violence towards women it depicts. Just awful. How did anyone ever think Ken Russel was any good?

Sorry I was so unfair about 'Mary Shelley', the movie.