Who the fuck is Ken Russell? I know the name and I’ve seen some of his huge filmography, but he has also always remained an elusive figure to me. I have never seen that many of his films and there doesn’t seem to be a real throughline in the ones that I have seen. Except that they are all weird.

This was not planned in any way, but as I was writing this I decided to check and these six movies I’ve covered are actually on the 366WeirdMovies canonical or apocryphal list. It is possible that the list has influenced my viewing habits in this particular case. However, that is still a great achievement and since he is not exactly Lynch or Fellini or Buñuel, all of whom have a similar number of movies on that list, the question is, why is he so obscure? Or is it just a blind spot of mine?

It seems that critics really hated his movies during his heyday. They constantly questioned his motives and they even attacked him personally instead of just criticizing his movies. “Russel [sic] can’t seem to pull the elements of filmmaking together”, as Pauline Kael put it in regards to Lisztomania. In a review of the same movie, The Christian Science Monitor (why would they even bother covering his movies) assumed Russell was just all about “drawing crowds”, which feels weird considering that he was way too experimental and outrageous to be commercially viable. Sure, he had some success, because otherwise he wouldn’t have had such a long career, but clearly he wasn’t just trying to be popular. I guess some nudity is enough for Christian Scientists to assume so.

He was not afraid to provoke. Some people did see his value during his time, as Fellini called him the British version of himself. In some ways his career is quite sad. Early on in his career, he made a now-obscure movie Women in Love, which received four Oscar nominations, including one for Russell himself for his direction, and a win for Glenda Jackson for best actress in a leading role (a bit of trivia: She later became a member of parliament in the UK). His final films were shot on video when that was no longer a valid way of making films, largely shot on his own lands and often featuring himself. As he couldn’t find distribution, he released them himself on the Internet back when that was not in any way a legit business strategy. Apparently, part of this was that he was often difficult to work with. Perhaps for similar reasons, there’s actually a separate page on Wikipedia just for his unrealized projects. These include some notable ones taken over by other directors like A Clockwork Orange and Superman.

Now he is a cult figure, who is seen as a visionary, who was way ahead of his time. His excessive style has been cited as an inspiration by the likes of Guillermo del Toro, who came to his defense when Warner made cuts to The Devils (see below).

Final fun fact before I talk about a selection of his movies: Before becoming a director, Ken Russell was a dancer.

The Lair of the White Worm
United Kingdom, 1988, dir. Ken Russell

A half-star review from Letterboxd: only watched cause it was on the lesbian vampire movie list. really bad

A five-star review from Letterboxd: WWLSMW: What Would Lady Sylvia Marsh Wear?

An archaeologist finds a weirdly shaped and quite big skull on the property he is living at. He finds it fascinating, but a local noble woman steals it while hissing and spraying something from her mouth on a crucifix on the wall. When the lady of the house the skull was stolen from wonders about the liquid on the wall and touches it, she has a very violent vision of Roman legionnaires raping nuns while a crucified Jesus figure is being attacked by a huge worm coiled around it. Soon after people in the village start to disappear.

We tend to think of certain artists from the past in context of a single work. Take Bram Stoker. He is known for Dracula, but he also wrote The Lair of the White Worm, on which this is based. On the other hand, I have not read that book, but according to people who have, the title is pretty much everything Russell took from it.

Worm here, as explained in the movie, does not refer to something like an earthworm, but it is an old word for dragon instead. This is not really a mystery movie. We know the noblewoman is not really human. There is a mystery on what is her true nature and what does she want with the skull, but there is also so much talk of dragons that it is quite obvious from the beginning that the skull belongs to one.

This is an early starring role for Hugh Grant and his detached style is already on display here and I’m not sure if it’s to the detriment or benefit of the movie. In a way it is appropriate, because he is the descendant of a man who supposedly killed the dragon.

While the movie has a horror setup, it doesn’t really feel like horror. It is actually hard to pinpoint what it does feel like. Hugh Grant is not the only one acting in a way that feels off. His butler, for example, seems very bored and/or exasperated by him. The actual villain, on the other hand, is just enjoying all the things she is doing here.

Gothic
United Kingdom, 1986, dir. Ken Russell

A half-star review from Letterboxd: It’s very cringy… But once you partake in the same drug the doctor gave everyone else. It’s clever

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Puts the eyes in titties

In the early 1800s, Percy Shelley takes his lover and future wife, Mary, and her stepsister to visit the infamous Lord Byron, who is living on his Swiss estate with his doctor and biographer, Polidori. Their evening starts with various stupid jokes, but at some point Byron suggests they each tell a story of something supernatural, which leads them to experience weird happenings.

While this is condensed to one night rather than whole summer, much of what happens here is more or less true. This is the time the future Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein. We can assume there was also a lot of debauchery, just like in the movie. There is so much drug usage here that it is intentionally made unclear what is actually real and what they only imagine. It doesn’t help that the shadows caused by a lightning storm outside is creating and shifting shadows.

The weird little man in the cover is a sleep paralysis demon. Sleep paralysis happens when a person is either falling asleep or waking up and can’t control their body, which remains still. When suffering from sleep paralysis, people sometimes feel a presence in the room and sometimes they feel like something is pushing down their chest and those things have become in the shared imagination a demon of some sort sitting there, watching you. Much of the movie is these encounters. Sometimes they are given an explanation, at other times they just happen. There’s also the masks. There’s white masks everywhere. Sometimes they are the faces of automatons in the manor house, but at one point Byron uses one to disguise a servant for his own reasons.

The ending feels hopeful, for some reason. One would assume that the night they experienced would leave a lot of trauma, but instead Mary, who sort of become our protagonist, has finally been able to exorcise the trauma of losing a child childbirth. That is actually the catalyst for Frankenstein, which from this point of view seems to be a kind of metaphor for the pains of birth.

Altered States
United Kingdom, 1980, dir. Ken Russell

A half-star review from Letterboxd: dude figured out how to turn himself into a monkey

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Right up there with the serpent and the rainbow in terms of white people fucking around and finding out films. Very entertaining with some curve balls thrown in.

According to William Hurt, he only agreed to do this movie, his first, because Ken Russell was wearing Betty Boop socks during their first discussion. Of course, this sounds ludicrous. Would a hopeful actor really say no to a starring role in a movie? Sure, he had done stage work and little TV, but moving to movies was a much bigger deal back in those days. Now, there isn’t much of a difference and a job is a job. Then again, if he read the script or the book it’s based on, I can understand why someone might have misgivings.

Eddie has some fun experimenting with a sensory deprivation tank as a student. Years later, when he starts to feel he is no longer doing anything meaningful as an academic, he decides to return to his earlier studies, but this time pushing them further with the inclusion of hallucinogenic drugs. Understandably, his family and colleagues (his wife belonging to both groups) are not happy with this, especially as he is reporting very weird results regarding genetic memory and devolving into earlier forms of humans.

While there is some very vivid and violent imagery in the movie, much of what Eddie or Dr. Jessup experiences is only given to us as his on-screen narration of what he sees and feels while in the deprivation tank. This is helpful from the point of view of the budget, but of course our imaginations are vivid as well, so we will fill in as required. That being said, we do get a nice sprinkling of body horror as that aforementioned genetic memory kicks in and Eddie becomes something else.

This is actually sort of based on real events. The inventor of sensory deprivation chamber, Dr. John Lilly, did experiment with hallucinogens in it. He even reported that one of his colleagues experienced becoming a hominid while hallucinating in the tank. Of course, the movie and the book before it have a very liberal reading of this. Lilly moved on to trying to communicate with dolphins. Take that as you will.

Lisztomania
United Kingdom, 1975, dir. Ken Russell

A half-star review from Letterboxd: this movie is not for kids in any way shape or form
(Author’s note: No, it is not. Is that a reason to give it a low rating?)

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Ken Russell is at his best when he’s being maximalist with his set design, wardrobe, and cinematography, and satirically psychosexual with his historical references, and oh boy is he firing on all cylinders here. Can’t believe this got shown at Psychotronic!

There is a scene in this movie, in which Roger Daltrey, the star of this movie and the singer of The Who, rides a huge erect Penis. That comes soon after he has literally crawled into a vagina. What else do you need?

Lisztomania was a real phenomenon around Franz Liszt, a Hungarian pianist and composer. It was kind of a precursor to Beatlemania over a hundred years later, but at the same time, the word ‘mania’ was seen as something much more meaningful than it is now. Liszt’s fans were rabid. The movie is about Liszt’s attempts to leave behind his hedonistic ways, but his fans (and at times Richard Wagner) just keep pulling him back.

The movie has a lot of in-jokes from which I’m not sure how well they play these days. Sure, most people will probably still recognize Ringo Starr in his role as the pope (who’s robes have a lot of photographs of supposedly famous people, but I can’t tell who they are) and two of the saints of music as Elvis and Elton John, but do people still know who Pete Townshend is? (No disrespect to him as he seems to be a good guy and he definitely has made important contributions to music.)

The movie gets weirdly anachronistic at times and sometimes just gets out of hand, like when a mad scientist makes a Thor (played by Rick Wakeman, another musician who might not be that famous these days, wearing a costume Disney would not be happy about these days) to free his fatherland.

The movie is a bit too all over the place for it’s own good, but that is the Russell way. It is the lightest of his movies I’ve seen and is often just silly. Whether you approve of that is up to you. The humor probably works just as well as it did in 1975, but mostly just because it’s so absurd that it doesn’t exactly require a specific knowledge of a specific era.

Tommy
United Kingdom, 1975, dir. Ken Russell

A half-star review from Letterboxd: how could something with source material as good as tommy end up as bad as tommy?

A five-star review from Letterboxd: As ableist as it is horny

So, Ken Russell did not only make one musical with The Who in 1975. He actually made two. This is based on The Who album and rock opera of the same name (which came out six years before the movie) and is about a man (played by Roger Daltrey) who overcomes his psychosomatic blindness, deafness and muteness, caused by seeing his mother and step-father murdering his real father, to become a pinball champion (while still being blind, deaf and mute), the most famous song from the album being Pinball Wizard (a role played by Elton John, a section of the movie that was played quite a bit on MTV back in my day). The movie was a pretty big hit, although the lack of success with Lizstomania killed any further collaborations.

One could easily argue that the movie is just a big gimmick. After all, there’s a bunch of musicians in the movie, including Tina Turner, Arthur Brown, Eric Clapton and, of course, The Who themselves. Somehow Jack Nicholson also found his way into the movie, although his role isn’t very big, but it is notable since this was the time when he was first peaking with Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.

The movie also includes all sorts of weirdness, like a Marilyn Monroe figure being offered to disabled people as a cure like it was a statue of a saint, and random cruelty, like Tommy’s cousin torturing him just because he is unable to resist in any way, or worse yet, his uncle rapes him (although this isn’t shown, just implied by sound and this part is also randomly quite homophobic). Sometimes there’s just random stuff like Tommy’s mother watching an advert for refried beans that are supposedly good enough for royalty.

So, what about the music? The Who took a weird route in their career. They had only been around for five years, but Pete Townshend was already looking to do something very different and they decided to do a rock opera and while there had been things that had been called rock operas before Tommy, there are people who acknowledge it as the first one. Now, most rock operas suck. They are self-indulgent, overly long and often just forced to conform into an overarching story rather than letting each song stand on it’s own. Tommy largely belongs to this category. It’s not that good as an album. As a movie, it’s fine, and in both cases, there are instances of music that definitely work.

As I’m writing this, The Who, or it’s remaining members, announced their farewell tour of North America, almost sixty years after their first American tour in 1967.

The Devils
United Kingdom, 1971, dir. Ken Russell

A half-star review from Letterboxd: I despise Ken Russell. A horrible screenplay with such basic dialogue that it hamstrung the actors and made any worthwhile performance impossible. It’s a disgustingly British telling of French history. And also on display here are some of the worst directorial choices I’ve ever seen: out-of-place sound effects, shitty cinematography consisting (at times) of rapid zooms, and absolutely zero attempts at subtlety. A mess from top to bottom.

The half star is for Ollie and his mustache. It’s a travesty this is part of his legacy.
(Author’s note: Oh, you mean the Oliver Reed who sexually assaulted someone on live television, while drunk as fuck? The man who got into fights in bars? The man who tried to expose himself to Geena Davis on the set of Cutthroat Island? You mean the warmonger who dodged taxes by moving away from mainland England? Oh yeah, that legacy.)

A five-star review from Letterboxd: The ending is too powerful. Probably one of the most powerful films ever made. Every element makes you hateful, but you cannot stop watching and believing that a movie, tackling such religious conflict, is jumping out of the screen and making you feel like this. Crazy shit

This is loosely based on a real story. At least many of the characters were real people and there was indeed a Father Grandier who was burned at the stake in 1634. Of course, this is a interpretation of the events with a specific goal in mind.

There’s a plague raging in the city. Father Granier, who is in control after the death of the governor, is trying to fight the cruel ways people are trying to cure the disease while he is also taking part in various ways in worldly pleasures. The convent finds him very handsome and even the mother superior is having indecent fantasies about him.

This is often seen as one of the most controversial movies of all time, which would of course mean that if it was released today, that would be the basis for the marketing campaign, although, as it happens, Mark Kermode has claimed that Warner Bros is blocking certain parts of the movie from being released as distasteful. Even the version I have is missing about ten minutes of footage.

Is it blasphemous? Not really, although I am atheist, so I feel very differently about these things. There is a weird misunderstanding about blasphemy in general. People are not and they are not supposed to be seen as holy. People are people and have various weaknesses. This movie has nothing to do with Christian God or Jesus. It does have everything to do with the people who have personal needs and desires and who use the church to their own benefit in various ways. As the movie itself states, most nuns came to the convents, because their noble families wanted to get rid of them. It was pretty much the same for monks. They were the younger sons of nobility, who didn’t have other prospects as the oldest son would inherit the family fortune, so they would find new ways to satisfy their ambitions within the church.

So, while the story might not be literally true, there is truth to it.