After unearthing a strange skull, archaeology student Angus (Peter Capaldi) and local aristocrat James d'Ampton (Hugh Grant) fall prey to their mysterious neighbour Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe).
Lady Sylvia is an acolyte of the countryside's most famous legend, the d'Ampton worm, a large, snake-like dragon who used to plague the area hundreds of years before.
When the skull vanishes, so do the locals - and it falls to our unlikely heroes to face down Lady Sylvia before she can resurrect her reptilian master.
I had only seen one Ken Russell film before this - his Harry Palmer instalment Billion Dollar Brain.
I need to do a deep dive into his work.
From beginning to end, Lair of the White Worm feels like a pisstake.
It has some scares ( some of Lady Sylvia’s attacks) and audiovisual delirium, but the emphasis is designed to expose the story’s artifice.
Russell claimed it was a comedy, and Lair of the White Worm works as a demented parody of a Hammer horror.
Amanda Donohoe is delightfully deadpan as the antagonist, and a young Hugh Grant is fine as the local aristocrat who stumbles into his ancestor’s legacy.
The film has its oversized tongue in cheek, but I think watching it on a computer did not help. It might take a couple of viewings but its grip on the tone feels a shade off.
As the film progresses, its heightened gothic surrealism begins to gel, and the film turns into a series of darkly cartoonish punchlines: A snake man charmed by a bagpiper; The mongoose - the iconic snake foe - ends up part of a gruesome pratfall.
The most striking scenes are the video superimpositions. Depicting visions of Roman soldiers attacking maidens while the Lambton Worm wraps itself around a crucified Jesus while flames overlay every image, these scenes are a jolt of MTV-inspired hell.
The film’s use of familiar horror conventions is consistently off, as though Russell is more interested in exposing the artifice of this genre exercise.
It feels disinterested, but not in a way that leads to the film’s sense of frivolity - it should be noted that the novel it is based on is regarded as one of the worst in the genre (akin to the fossilised skull discovered at the beginning).
It is not interested in horror as an affect, but as a miss-en-scene to be rearranged to suit the filmmakers’ sense of irony.
While stories like the Lambton Worm carry warnings, maybe the film’s message that these warnings are destined to be ignored.
It is a little patchy (some of the younger actors are wooden) but the film is hilarious and rather sexy.
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