Ostensibly making a gothic horror, Russell repeatedly undermines the mood with moments of absurdity – some deliberate, many not, and snippets of dialogue apparently borrowed from Are You Being Served? Elsewhere, Russell's snake-means-phallus obsession is just tiresome.īeyond all that, and unlike some so-called guilty pleasures that are trashy but nonetheless well-made, The Lair of the White Worm is undeniably a stinker.īadly shot, clumsily edited and seemingly scored by a teenage boy who has just taken delivery of his first synthesiser and then pressed all the buttons one by one, the film has a peculiarly jarring tone. This worrying tone crystalises in an almost indescribably strange dream sequence where Grant's aristocratic scion of worm-slayers, Lord James D'Ampton, boards a private jet – don't ask, mainly because it doesn't make any sense – and plays out a scene resembling a video made for an 80s hair-metal band but dropped for featuring too many shots of ladies in stockings.
While Capaldi and Grant are the heroes, the female characters are either vamps (strictly speaking vampiric snakes) or trembling innocents, and spend considerably more time in their underwear than necessary. Revisiting the film for the first time in some years – not even Channel 5 schedulers trouble viewers with it these days – I was struck by how, well, guilty a guilty pleasure it is. The regional accents are a welcome detail.Lair is adapted from Dracula author Bram Stoker's little-read late novel, and for those who've not had the mixed pleasure of one of the more unsettling 90 minutes in modern cinema, the plot revolves around an ancient monster, as much dragon as snake, which intermittently emerges from its cavern in the Derbyshire hills to feed on humans, and is hunted down by an alarmingly young-looking, floppy-haired Peter Capaldi and Hugh Grant. Moves at a clip and the acting, while it is all over the place, seems to be hitting all the right notes to make this a breezy fun. The devil is in the details, and even thing like the use of a ladder (instead of the proper aeronautic equipment) to climb onto a plane seems like an additional hidden morsel. The psychedelic qualities of the venom allow the director to inject (pun intended) bizarre, surrealistic imagery anytime he feels like it.
Naughty, stylish, fun, witty, clever, sexy, gory, profane horror film by way of Russell’s hallucinatory sensibilities. But, does anyone care?Įven something like Squirm (1976) seems to be a possible, remote influence (snake/worm victims acquire snake/worm-like characteristics.) There seems to be obvious, uncommented upon, physical discrepancies between the creatures presented the natural snakes, the human snakes, the snake skull found, the snakes from the visions/hallucination scenes and ultimately to the Dionin White Worm. Ken Russell borrows liberally form Cult of the Cobra (1955) and The Reptile (1966) (which now I have to revisit) and not only uses snake imagery (Chinese dragon-type puppet, mosaics, a snakes & ladders board game, etc.) but puts his mitts on everything that might possibly resemble even superficially a snake, worms, hoses, necklaces, dragons even vampires. Its immortal priestess resents Johnnie-come-lately Christianity for having supplanted it and for building itself on the ruins of the ancient order, which goes a long way to explain the antipathy towards crucifixes and Christian iconography. An ancient pagan snake cult survives to the modern day only to be confronted by modern day descendants/reincarnations of local Saint George/Saint Patrick like historical figures.