THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988) Definitely a step up from Gothic, anyway... I imagine that when Ken Russell was making this movie, he might've been thinking of it as some sort of companion piece to his loathed-by-everybody wanksterpiece Gothic. When I first saw this long ago, it was with relief that I noted that the two movies really don't have much in common, and this one indulges us in more of the fun trash that Russell made his name on. It's got its share of Gothic's stuffy pretentious bore, but at least here it's tempered with (huzzah!) nudity, slimy monsters, and grotesque, semi-accidental deaths. Hugh Grant, who's speaking so confidently and stutter-free that he's scarcely recognizable, stars as a lord or a baron or something like that who holds parties and does whatever lord/barons do. He's got this butler who seems to take a barely-repressed sexual pleasure in obeying his master. A visiting palaeontologist (Peter Capaldi) discovers a reptilian-looking skull fossil nearby, and soon enough this lady who's really into snakes (Amanda Donohoe) makes a big mess of things. ("Snakes and Ladders is my passion" says the snake woman - how can anybody be passionate about a game most people rightly grow out of by the time they figure out it's based on complete chance?) For sure, Russell's distaste for subtlety manifests itself all over the place. People keep tripping over hoses (Ooh! They're like snakes!), people eat a spaghetti-like dish while talking about worms, and it turns out to be worms...and of course, a dream where sexy stewardesses have a catfight while the pen in Grant's hand tilts up and up and up. There's even a psychedelic psychic vision (a little too close to a psychic link for my comfort) where one character sees a bunch of semi-nude nuns getting raped by Romans in front of a wyrm-draped Christ on the cross. This all is based, presumably loosely, on a Bram Stoker story I've never read. So, I don't know whose fault it is that the movie misses the extinction of the dinosaurs by over forty million years, or that it plays out as if snakes are "charmed" by music and not by the movement of the charmer's flute. All the female characters are total airheads ("One of us should be home getting the visitors' tea ready!") except the snake woman, who venomously bites a guy right on his, uh, snake, and later on sports a strap-on wooden dildo big enough to pain the most fist-loosened porn grandma. It's awkward, lumbering trash, but it's fitfully entertaining enough that you'll probably survive a watching. Despite at times venturing too much into vampire territory for my tastes, it's got its moments, like the best death-by-snake-statue I think I've ever seen, a climax with a comely maiden of virtue true being strung up over a pit with a monster in it (in her underwear, no less), and Donohoe is a hoot throughout. She even sleeps in a basket. Still, was the grenade at the end really necessary? So much for science, bozo. I might not be crazy about this movie, but I'd rather watch it a hundred times on end, eyes pried open the whole time, then sit through Gothic again. BACK TO THE L's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE