I watched Ken Russell's Gothic on DVD during the weekend. The movie uses as its taking-off point the stormy weekend where Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and his physician, Dr. John Polidori, entertained themselves writing ghost stories, which produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, and Polidori's The Vampyre. The movie, though, makes these four play instead with black magic and summon forth their deepest fears, which haunt them through the night.

Quite the cheery movie, but somewhat muddled by lax storytelling. Russell seems more interested in delivering a decadent sensuality, having his actors pile on food, wine and sex, and pushing them to get as messy with it a possible. We get images like a cunnilingus where the performer ends with his lips streaked red in blood, a suit of armor with a monstruous phallic codpiece advancing on its female victim, and one of the guests spitting a mouthful of spaghetti she was about to eat. Oh, and a plate of some mush writhing with leeches.

Definitely Ken Russell territory, at least after comparing Gothic with another Russell movie also out on DVD: The Lair of the White Worm. This adaptation from an obscure Bram Stoker novel (besides Dracula, which of Stoker's books is well known?) tells about the confrontation in modern-day England between a nobleman (played by Hugh Grant, no less) and a serpent-vampire woman looking to raise the White Worm, an ancient dragon-serpent living underground.

There's a clearer story thread running through the movie, but Russell decides to camp it up to an inch of its life; and so we get scenes like the serpent woman dancing in a trance to snake-charming music (even when played on a harmonica or bagpipes) or her seduction of a boy-scout she finds hitchhiking under the rain. My favorite scene: a dream sequence where Hugh Grant's character, strapped to a seat, watches two women (the serpent creature and another hottie he's recently met) catfighting. The camera lolls from Grant's mug to the hand on his lap, where he's limply holding a red felt-tip pen. As the fight's pace increases, that pen is no longer hanging limply: it rises, rises, rises... until it's giving its full attention to the struggling women. Cheeky fun.

I hope it becomes evident from these descriptions that these movies are pure trash. Which is completely OK, because as far as I can tell, that's Russell's aim, to have as much trashy excess onscreen as possible. Watching them, I had to wonder why I had wanted to see them (they had fancy summaries, that's why) since they don't amount to great or even good filmmaking at all. But thinking about how much fun they seemed as they played, an answer came: because sometimes trash is its own reward, however ephemeral.

And so, having discovered the pleasure of movie excess, I can look forward to other Ken Russell movies and hours of cheap thrills.

The Gothic DVD is a bare-bones affair: just the movie (a scratched print), the trailers and scene selections. The publishers could certainly take a hint from the Lair of the White Worm DVD, which contains a very funny commentary track by Ken Russell and production notes. All these could be great additions to the Gothic DVD, though I feel that production notes and any other written essays should be replaced by audio essays. Consider: If you are going to read text on a screen, you might as well use your computer; it's a lot easier than trying to read from a TV set sitting 4 to 6 feet away. TV is a passive medium, trasmitting information toward us, instead of expecting to have us squint and figure out what's written on the screen. So why not take those production notes and do them in voice-over, playing over movie sequences and stills, production stills and other material that can be gathered around the movie? This kind of audio essay wouldn't cost too much to produce: just get a professional voice actor, cut a stills montage, and voilà. The particular extra feature that could be added to this film would be a brief documentary about the real Lord Byron, the Shelleys and Dr. Polidori, which would tell the real story of the night when Frankenstein and The Vampyre were written.