Whatever
Bram Stoker had in mind when he wrote his 1911 novel, The Lair of
the White Worm, it surely could
not have been the image of Amanda Donohoe in black lingerie and
thigh-length PVC boots sinking her teeth into the genitals of a boy
scout. In fact, it's hard to imagine that audiences arriving at the
premier of Ken Russell's 1988 film adaptation were expecting that
either. What Russell himself had in mind was more of a mix of Oscar
Wilde (having previously directed Salome's Last Dance, released the
same year), and the legend of the Lambton Worm, the connection made
explicit by the inclusion of C. M. Leumane's folk song describing the
tale, with the character names reworked to fit those depicted in the
film. At the time of release, the film was billed as a "horror
comedy." A more accurate description would be, "a mess,"
but at least it's an interesting mess.
No one was expecting this. Least of all him.
Pitched somewhere between those
two great British traditions, the Hammer Horror and the Tarts and
Vicars Party, the film opens on Angus Flint (Peter Capaldi), and
archaeology student digging up what, at first, appears to be a
dinosaur skull whilst excavating the ruins of a convent in the
grounds of Mercy Farm bed and breakfast. The bed and breakfast is run
by Mary and Eve Trent (Sammi Davis and Catherine Oxenberg,
respectively), who were apparently orphaned when their parents
disappeared without a trace, the previous year. The trio attend a
party held by Eve's boyfriend, the new Lord d'Ampton (Hugh Grant),
and Angus learns the legend of the d'Ampton Worm, a dragon reputed to
have terrorised the local countryside. Coinciding with all this is
the onset of spring, and the return to the county of Lady Silvia
Marsh (Amanda Donohoe), who jokes that she spends her winters
hibernating. Upon learning of the discovery of the skull, Lady Silvia
steals it from Mercy Farm and retreats back to her own residence,
Temple House, where she, a vampire/snake woman/pagan priestess, plans
to find virginal human sacrifices for the offspring of her
self-reproducing hermaphrodite master-mistress, Dionin, a Pagan
snake-god, who d'Ampton's ancestor slew centuries before.
Yep. It's one of those of movies.
The
Lair of the White Worm came about because Vestron Pictures, who had
financed Russell's Gothic (1986) had agreed to finance The Rainbow
(1989) only if Russell delivered another horror movie first. Producer
Dan Ireland claims that Russell wrote the screenplay in less than a
week and originally wanted Tilda Swinton to play Lady Sylvia, but
after she read the script, the actress wouldn't return his phone
calls. This actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since
Donohoe is the best thing about the film; relishing the opportunity
to camp it up at every turn; she's clearly having enormous fun here,
and is so uninhibited that she actually manages to carry an air of
authority, even when parading around in the nude. By contrast,
Oxenberg is by far and away the weakest link in the cast, having
played Amanda Carrington on the TV series Dallas, she was cast purely
on name value and her voice had to be (very badly) dubbed by someone
who could actually pull off a Northern accent. Hugh Grant is Hugh
Grant, and Davis plays her role with a high-pitch "Oop North"
intonation that makes her sound like a children's television
presenter, while Capaldi's goody-two-shoes Angus is, weirdly, the
real hero of the film, despite much set-up for d'Ampton to fulfil his
destiny by following in his ancestor's footsteps and slaying the
monster. It is only Angus who actually manages to take any effective
action, while d'Ampton himself confines himself to lots of detective
work and only scores a couple of minor victories, the most
spectacular of which is the slaying of the Trent sister's
now-vampiric mother, Dorothy (Imogen Clair), who d'Ampton literally
slashes in two with his family sword.
It's not really sword, more of a
Chekhov's Gun.
The
plot in general not only makes very little sense--not that it needs
to--but because the four heroes' character arcs become muddled with
one and other's, the overall pay-off is ultimately unsatisfying. It's
pretty clear that the script was written in haste, and it really
could have done with a couple of redrafts before production began.
It's not just d'Ampton and Angus who suffer from confused character
development, but the Trent sisters as well, with Eve being chosen as
the virgin sacrifice, despite having spent the night with d'Ampton
(although, we never see what they were doing, they do behave as
though they were more than just "dancing," and d'Ampton
says), and in spite of Mary coming across as the more innocent of the
two. It's something of a mystery as to why Russell even included four
main heroic roles in the first place, other than to emulate Stoker's
formula of having a group of people band together to defeat a
supernatural foe, except that Stoker used this device to emphasise
the villain's power, and usually included an academic figure who was
expert in these matters (such as Van Helsing, or Sir Nathaniel de
Salis, in the case of this film's source material). Russell gives us
no such analogue, and the characters he does retain from the novel
bare little resemblance to their literary counterparts, not even
sharing their names. Given that Ireland mistakenly stated in an
interview that Stoker died before finishing the novel (he actually
died a year after completing it), one can only assume that the
production was working from the 1925 abridged version, which does
come across as extremely fragmentary. Ultimately, the intention was
to make something purely commercial because Gothic did well on home
video. Russell doesn't seem to care about his material, but sees no
reason not to have fun with it. The film's greatest flaw, however, is
that Russell descends into self-parody, something he would do more
and more as his career went on. The Devils (1971) may have been
highly absurdist, even downright surreal at times, but it had teeth,
and, given that it was based on real events, extremely sharp ones at
that. The Lair of the White Worm only has plastic joke shop fangs.
...Like these.
Even
though the movie does have its fun moments, such as Lady Sylvia
emerging from a tanning bed like a vampire arising from a coffin, or
the ridiculous climax in which Oxenberg raises the White Worm from
its pit whilst wearing nothing other than blue body make-up and an
enormous fang-shaped strap-on dildo, it too often feels as if Russell
was phoning it in, ticking off the boxes of what makes a Russell
film; touching a crucifix splashed with Lady Sylvia's venom causes
Eve to suffer an hallucinogenic trip filled with writhing,
masturbating nuns who are assaulted by Roman solders at the foot of
Jesus' cross, while the titular phallic serpent wraps itself around
the messiah himself.
Cocks, Christ and Naughty Nuns:
Ken Russell by numbers.
This, along with other iconoclastic nightmare
sequences not only call to mind The Devils, but Russell's own Altered
States (1980) as well. The cheesy Quantel video effects used to
achieve these visions make the sequences look like one of his Sarah
Brightman music videos, and one can't help but wonder if Russell was
only including naughty nuns in order to repeat the controversy of his
earlier work. Grant spends most of his screen-time wearing an RAF
uniform for no other reason than to resemble Robert Powell in Tommy
(1975), and his Freudian dream, in which he is led aboard concord,
where he is surrounded by phallic imagery, would look like one of
that film's musical numbers if it weren't for the fact that Donohoe
and Oxenberg end up wrestling each other in skimpy air hostess
outfits that are less British Airways and more Ann Summers.
"Uncle! Uncle!"
If
the film had been a straight horror film, it may have worked, but
it's all too ridiculous to be scary, and far too camp to be genuinely
funny. While parody is fine, self-parody is fatal, since it makes the
audience question whether the film-maker was ever serious to begin
with. The Devils was witty without ever loosing its power to shock;
Women in Love (1969) was camp enough to get away with its
histrionics, but never slipped into the realms of unintentional
comedy. The whole attitude behind The Lair of the White Worm seems to
be, "let's have a fun day's filming, then off to the pub
afterwards." This is not a message that should be woven into the
fabric of any film, let alone one made by a man once consider the
enfant terrible of
British cinema.
"Pub?"
