Director: Ken Russell
Screenplay: Ken Russell
Cast: Hugh Grant as Lord James
D'Ampton; Amanda Donohoe as Lady Sylvia Marsh; Catherine Oxenberg as Eve Trent;
Peter Capaldi as Angus Flint; Sammi Davis as Mary Trent; Stratford Johns as
Peters; Paul Brooke as Ernie; Imogen Claire as Dorothy Trent
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #210/An Abstract Film Candidate
If we begin with the source of this film, The Lair of the White Worm was Irish author Bram Stoker's last novel. Whilst it has the original template of that novel, based off the legend of the Lambton Worm whose evil (and followers) terrorise the locals in this story, this adaptation alongside modernising it also greatly deviates greatly. Stoker' novel is weird, bearing in mind it was released in a truncated form as well, including significantly more dead mongoose than the sole one you get in the film, and a whole bizarre subplot where a character becomes obsessed with floating a kite outside his house, which is important to the novel's finale. It is also unfortunately racist, entirely because the character Arabella March, the antagonist, has an African manservant named Oolanga who, by characters and the author, is called racist terms for description and is a completely gross caricature of evil from a racial bias. Thankfully, in his modernisation, Russell scrapped that character and effectively made a Hammer horror film is he perverted one.
He is colouring carefully between the lines, under the watchful eye of Vestron Pictures (who would later fund his D.W. Lawrence adaptation The Rainbow (1989)), but he finds ways to get away with material within these confines, his adaptation repurposing the main concept of the Lambton worm. The "worm" (i.e. dragon) is real folklore, involving a worm-like dragon which was eventually slain by a figure named John Lambton, a folk song by C. M. Leumane re-told and played in character by a band in the beginning of the film to set up the context. Here, a young Peter Capaldi is Angus Flint, a budding archaeologist from Scotland who finds a strange skull in the land. A young Hugh Grant early in his career is Lord James D'Ampton, an ancestor of the figure who originally slain the worm.
Of note is that Russell, who felt the source material was a disappointment from Stoker1, really deviates from the source completely, including how it comes to the female villainess, here now interpreted into Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe). Marsh is the mysterious figure who, with intent on the sisters Eve Trent (Catherine Oxenberg) and Mary Trent (Sammi Davis), who run a bed and breakfast, is very early on established as both the villainess and half-snake, an immortal figure who allows Donohoe to seductively and gleefully chew scenery between seducing boy scouts and spitting poison on crucifixes with hallucinogenic properties. The film is Donohoe's by a country mile, making the idea that they had originally considered a young Tilda Swinton for the role, who declined it, even more surreal in hindsight2.
An intrinsic sense of the absurd is found here, and the crude intermingles with it in a full embrace. For the most part, this is a straight forward horror film, one you could easily have had Hammer make in the sixties with Peter Cushing and not a lot of it would have to be changed, even that this revolves around a cult of snake people who can add more to their side through "snake vamperism" and their bites. Russell, the notorious scallywag of films as strange as Lisztomania (1975) when he had carte blanche, had always been absurd or with his serious work being transgressively exaggerated, even here with a wink and a nod with all the snake and phallic symbolism, from hosepipe to Donohoe playing snakes n ladders with a victim.
Even in this film as well, you witness some bizarre moments befitting the director. Wishing to evoke The Devils (1971) and having discovered green screen technology, you get video effect freak outs to tell the back-story of the LambtonWorm in hallucinations, including spiked fake phallus, and a scene of a giant white worm wrapping around Christ as Roman soldiers terrorise and rape nuns in front of video toaster imposed fire and Donohoe cavorting around nude or a snake woman. Or the dream on an airplane as Hugh Grant watches Donohoe and Catherine Oxenberg as stewardesses wrestling each other and a phallic use of a red marker pen.
This is not a film from the mad, ambitious seventies or early eighties of Russell, as in spite of all I have described this is still restrained compared to other work. Not long after this, excluding Whore (1991), he would move on to television but also a lot of ultra obscure projects, on Uri Geller film, an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother and films shot in his own garage. So, in his attempt at a mainstream horror film, you see as much one of his last hurrahs too, taking this template and giving it a nice shot in the arm with his eccentricities.
Abstract Spectrum: Exaggerated/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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1) Bless the people making old copies of Fangoria available until collections are publically available.
2) Based on information from the Trailers from Hell commentary by Vestron executive Dan Ireland.
