Brale (Bruce Anderson, Gregory Hagan, Dale Sophiea), the world's only Ken Russell tribute band, will play a brief set before the screening.

Ken Russell's first theatrical feature, French Dressing, was released in 1964 and he went on to undress cinema with a seductive string of flamboyant films that stripped bare sexuality, the horrorific, and creativity itself. His breakthrough film, Women in Love (1969), was followed by a suite of quirky bio-pics, The Music Lovers, Lisztomania, Savage Messiah, and Mahler, punctuated by a discordant ensemble of stylish oddities like The Devils, Tommy, and Altered States. Extravagantly excessive, Gothic takes us inside the country estate where in 1816 Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), Mary Shelley, and poet/partner Percy (Julian Sands) agonizingly birth the monster to be called Frankenstein. This indulgent story, both theirs and ours, wriggles with frantic impulses and lurking phobias. Lord Byron, limp and all, is the head hedonist, spurring his guests to greater depths of fear and fantasy: “the storm outside is calm compared to what's inside your head,” he says to a laudanum looped Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy and Mary (Natasha Richardson in debut) are the haunted parents of a stillborn child whose form is revivified in the gothic creature to come. Pop composer Thomas Dolby adds his overblown strains to a setting already fraught with a surfeit of impropriety. This is Ken Russell in all his untamed grandiosity, one of the great purple pros. He's probably catching hell in heaven right now.