‘The Lair of The White Worm’ or — Snake Charm or Snake Oil?
I’ll be honest up front and admit I’ve always had a big soft spot for Ken Russell’s ‘The Lair of The White Worm’ (1988) since I was a teenager, even though it’s a film I’m not sure I could defend in the slightest. I mean, I’d always thought it was god-awful but I’d also found it utterly captivating in its godawfulness. But would it hold up as some form of freaky fluff revisiting it today or would it collapse under a host of pretentions and problems? Turns out (spoilers!) the answer was… both!
‘The Lair of The White Worm’ is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel of the same name, except with a host of other freaky shit thrown in for good measure too: so there’s Christian and Pagan symbolism, often both entwined in an orgiastic embrace; English mythology, sexual repression; modernity vs. the ancient, bagpipes vs. snakes; the Roman corruption of Christianity and all that was lost through that particular process; the denial of the Jungian dark side, bitey blow jobs and leather fetish gear. Oh, and a pair of giant hi-fi speakers on top of a castle blasting out music, which might be the most Ken Russelly Ken Russell image I can imagine (music, modern tech and a gothic pile). Pretty crazy, uh?
Well, what’s even crazier is that ‘The Lair of The White Worm’ does absolutely NOTHING with any of these themes… at all! They’re all here and present but there’s zero examination or exploration of a single one of them. This makes ‘The Lair of The White Worm’ an intellectually hollow experience, despite all the intoxicating imagery on display.
The good news is that it also provides plenty of fodder for a unique approach to a horror movie, and that’s what I very much appreciate this movie for. I certainly can’t think of another nun-raping, bloody phallus licking, knee-biting horror flick that readily comes to mind. And all these incongruous visuals give ‘TLOTWW’ a distinctly uncanny atmosphere. The movie isn’t scary in the slightest, but it is truly unnerving, and when Russell hits us with one of his hallucinations sequences (something he was already the master of) the effect can be mindblowingly terrifying.
This is mostly down to Amanda Donohoe’s performance as the acolyte of the worm itself. She seduces the innocent so they may be sacrificed to her god, and her god is not a vegetarian. She incapacitates her victims by spraying them with her deadly venom, a venom which induces nightmarish hallucinations that blow what Dana Barrett saw in her fridge in ‘Ghostbusters’ (1984) out of the fucking water in terms of their unhinged intensity. And all this whilst she’s dressed in a series of increasingly outlandish leather gear. She is sexually, and existentially, extraordinarily unsettling and alluring.
It’s also from this tension that a lot of the film’s humour is derived. For example, after poor Eve (Catherine Oxenberg) has her first terrifying, venom induced vision Huge Grant politely asks her what all that fuss was about, as though she’d simply been on the phone to the guy from the local Rumblelows. There’s a lot of incongruity at play here and it’ll either delight or exasperate you.
‘TLOTWW’ might also exasperate some as it has some flaws, and I mean pretty big ones. It’s not that the story doesn’t make sense (it does) but it’s that there are a few scenes that simply bring the entire movie to a screeching halt, specifically one in the caves which is not only superfluous but deadeningly dull. Likewise with the actors and their acting where you can’t quite tell who is in on the joke (Donohoe and Capaldi for sure) and who isn’t (Hugh Grant for definite). So again, we’re confronted with potentially movie-ruining incongruity.
That’s the thing about ‘The Lair of The White Worm’ which is that everything that’s indefensible about it is also what’s appealing about it. I was constantly shaking my head at this film throughout at what it was doing but with a huge grin on my face at the same time and what it was doing because I couldn’t imagine any other film doing it. It’s like Huge Grant’s dream sequence: on the surface it feels surreal and meaningless but it is actually tapping directly into the film’s main themes — the Concorde is a giant, metal phallus which is appropriate for representing Grant’s controlled masculinity of modernity. This modern masculinity is then threatened by the historical feminine. I think! Either way, it’s still thematically resonant and simultaneously a load of bollocks. I loved it.
Apparently Ken Russell wrote ‘The lair of The White Worm’ in four days and I can well believe that. In fact, it feels like he shot it in four days too because this has a real slapdash quality to it. SO slapdash it could put some people off.
Personally I like films and filmmakers that aren’t afraid to play fast and loose. I prefer that to slavish perfectionism. It’s one of the reasons I often prefer Ken Russell to, say, Stanley Kubrick. Yes, Kubrick was a perfectionist but what gets sacrificed in that reaching for perfection? For me perfection often comes at the price of being hermetically sealed, of a suffocating airtight atmosphere where nothing can slip, quaver or quiver with technical uncertainty. For me this is frequently a price not worth paying. Sometimes there’s something to be said for simply sticking a pair of Walfdale speakers on top of your house and getting a set of bagpipes out.
