Gothic

10/28/2019

***Looks great, sounds good, but a load of dull, pretentious, perverse dreck*** The writer of Frankenstein (Natasha Richardson), her beau (Julian Sands) and half-sister (Myriam Cyr) visit the mad, bad recluse Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) at his lavish estate on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. There they meet Byron’s equally bizarre physician friend (Timothy Spall) and spend the stormy night of June 16, 1816, in hallucinatory revelry, including a challenge to write a spooky story, which gave birth to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” the first published modern vampire story. The premise of “Gothic” (1986) is great, the first act is interesting and the short epilogue is effective. Unfortunately, the hour in between is meandering, hedonistic, perverse