Ken Russell Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Amazon sellers are selling copies of Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance on DVD for a minimum of $214.89. It's not on Netflix. However, if you're in the mood for the kind of bizarrely decadent films that only writer/director Ken Russell (Gothic, The Lair of the White Worm) can serve up, it's high time you headed over to this hard-to-find Oscar Wilde adaptation for free over at SlashControl.

In Salome's Last Dance, Russell plays around with Oscar Wilde's banned play Salome, adding a bit of meta-goodness to the whole shebang by making the film about Oscar Wilde (Nickolas Grace) and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (Douglas Hodge) watching a performance of the famous play in a brothel. The actors are all employees or patrons. And it's no accident that this is also Guy Fawkes Day.

Alfred Taylor, the brothel-owner played by Stratford Johns, announces, "Guy Fawkes wanted to strike a spark for freedom and blow up a Parliament he considered oppressive; you have done the same with your play, Salome... In defiance of the law and in honor of our greatest playwright, the premiere of Salome will take place here tonight, the 5th of November, 1892."

The 18th annual Florida Film Festival ended a week ago last night, and do you want to know why our coverage of the fest is going up just now? Because I'm selfish and wanted to catch up with as many of the forty or so features as possible, even after the awards had been announced and everyone had gone home (for the record, I managed to miss each and every winning film -- Prince of Broadway, The Garden, Prodigal Sons, Neil Young: Don't Be Denied, and the exceedingly popular Poundcake -- and am kicking myself still).

However, between the appearances by Ken Russell, Glenn Close, and Jon Voight (oh, my!), I did manage to catch my fair share of world, regional, and local premieres at this celebration of Original Cinema, and you can see what we saw after the jump.

Uh-oh.

Submitted for your approval: a berk named Merk in bed with his bird. The fuzzy photo cannot really sum up what's going on here. The still I would have preferred is this film's money-shot: a red-cloaked Milton Berle conducting a Satanic mass in convincing Latin. Somehow this is not available on the Internet. Here, instead: a relatively chaste shot of quintuple threat Anthony Newley (actor/director/co-writer/singer/composer) grappling his real-life wife (the beeyoutiful and talented Joan Collins).

The still is a relic of what I've sometimes thought was the worst film ever made by a human being in world history.

British director Ken Russell has a style all his own -- his films are immediately recognizable, usually due to their portrayals of lavish decadence. (Scotsman.com recently published a good profile about the director.) I watched a bunch of his earlier films in college: The Devils, Women in Love, The Music Lovers, Gothic. The last one I saw was the campy yet barely coherent Lair of the White Worm ("slither in!"); none of Russell's later films have grabbed my attention. Still, it was fun to see him last year playing himself in the faux-documentary Brothers of the Head, which even contains some scenes from a pretend Russell film about the twins. I wondered what he was up to these days.

What Russell has been up to in the last month, however, is reminding us that the man also has a personal style all his own. No, he's not wandering around with a farm animal to promote his latest film (that would be David Lynch). Instead, he decided to take a turn on the BBC's Channel Four's hit reality show, Celebrity Big Brother. He was the show's oldest contestant -- and one of the few I recognized on the list of the show's housemates, along with Leo Sayer and Jermaine Jackson. The level of "celebrity" seems pretty low, although perhaps the contestants are better known to Brit audiences. At any rate, Russell only lasted two days in the Big Brother house, during which time he managed to drop his pants in mixed company, drive others crazy with his snoring, and get into an argument about cheese with Jade Goody, whom I presume is the UK's answer to Paris Hilton. He left the show over the weekend with the excuse that "I am a big old fuddy-duddy and some of the surprises were a little too much to take for someone of my sensibility." This from the guy who directed that nasty grate scene in The Music Lovers?

I'm hoping Russell will now return to working on something fabulously overwrought -- IMDb lists him as having an adaptation of Moll Flanders in pre-production, with Barry Humphries and playwright Steven Berkoff in the cast. I've no idea how accurate the IMDb listing is, but I hope Russell will direct something that will tempt me to the theater to watch. Something completely un-fuddy-duddy, please. He's nearly 80 years-old, but I hope he hasn't mellowed.

British director Ken Russell has always had a pretty strange reputation -- I mean, this is the guy who made Tommy and Altered States. Russell was known for his bizarre use of religious and sexual imagery in his films -- anyone who has seen Crimes of Passion can attest to that. In spite of his status as a pioneer of the 'X' rating, Russell is considered one of England's great directors.

Production Weekly announced that Russell has been attached to direct Kings X, starring Ray Winstone and Kevin Spacey. The director also must be feeling sentimental, as he has also cast 60's icon Twiggy, who he worked with on his first American film (The Boy Friend). Kings X is currently in pre-production in the UK.

The Chris Cleverly script sounds like your typical crime fare with low-level thugs, drugs and hookers -- oh, and don't forget a pretty girl in danger. Although, it does have the added kitsch of a protagonist who has a thing for recording his life on a cell phone camera, so I would expect some fancy camera tricks on Russell's part.

[via ComingSoon.net]