Other Crap

It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while a mediocre movie turns out to be more enjoyable than a great one you can admire or a bad one you can laugh at. This happens because the film’s creators leave behind a trail of crumbs, through absurd situations or dialogue, or just through subversive hints, that demonstrate that they are winking at us, that they really didn’t take their subject matter seriously, and are laughing right along with us. There were a lot of these films in the 80s and 90s. If Road House is the king of ridiculously entertaining mediocrity, the princes would be Wild Things and Lair of the White Worm. Any sensible critic would tell you not to waste your time on such entertaining trash, and to turn your attention instead to filmmakers who care about the problems of the world, or at least about the importance of “cinema.”

Screw those critics, and the academy that looks down with disdain on entertainment. I love this kind of film.

Here is the full gallery, including a link that allows you to download all the pics together in a zip file. That link is on the top of the page, underneath the heading “(34 images)”

Some decades ago, Tuna and I had this to say about the film:

Scoop said (total spoilers):

Late in his life, Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula, wrote the story upon which this film is (very loosely) based. It’s about a giant white snake that has lived in a series of subterranean English caves and caverns since Roman times, fed by a cult of immortal snake-worshippers who bring it virgins. I’m not sure why the virginity is necessary. I mean the frigging snake is a carnivore. What’s he gonna do if he shows up hungry and the high priestess brings him a tasty 18 year old who got laid once at her Homecoming Dance? Is he gonna get finicky and refuse to eat, like Morris the Frigging Cat, until he gets the properly unsullied Snake Chow?

Anyway …

The snake-people work exactly like vampires. When they bite humans, they can turn the humans into fellow snakepires, or they can kill them.

Hugh Grant is the star, but he’s not a snakepire. He’s some kind of old money aristocrat with a Stately Hugh Manor located conveniently adjacent to venerable Snakepire-upon-the-Moors-and-Heaths-and-Heather. Amanda Donohoe is the head snakepire, an aristocratic head of the snake cult, and owner of the world’s only scary, rotting old castle with a built-in tanning bed. I haven’t read the book, but I think Bram Stoker died before WW1, so there may not have been a tanning bed in the original story. Or maybe Stoker was one of those visionaries like Leonardo or Jules Verne, and could predict the modern world’s need for tanning beds for vam- and snake- pires. After all, it makes sense. Creaturepires never go out in the sun, so how else can they look normal among their fellow sybarites? If they didn’t tan they’d have to spend their entire lives in the company of Rose McGowan.

Surprisingly, Ken Russell directed this. Remember him? He’s the guy who did all the biographies of famous decadent musicians who dreamt about masturbating nuns. Russell brought kind of a savage head-in-the-gutter iconoclasm to his best works, like his adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, but all that raw energy is converted here into High Camp.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Russell’s favorite gimmick is to look inside the dreams and visions of his characters, and he uses that schtick here to show a lame Hugh Grant fantasy abut catfighting airline stewardesses, all of which has almost nothing to do with the plot in either meaning or tone. In the campiest of the film’s moments, Grant is doing a crossword puzzle on the plane when the evil stewardess and the good stewardess break into their fight. The pencil in Hugh’s lap keeps pointing farther and farther upward as he watches the catfight. I didn’t make that up. It really is exactly what happened.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say there weren’t any stewardesses in the original Bram Stoker story.

Eventually the good guys manage to defeat the snakepires, of course. How do they do it? You won’t even believe it when if I tell you, because it sounds like the kind of crap I’d make up, but I’ll tell ya anyway.

First of all, they play snake-charmer music, copying a plot from an old Batman episode. Hugh Grant has some old 78s lying around Stately Hugh Manor, which is not illogical. What is surprising is that he just happens to have about a zillion high-powered amplifiers lying around. Apparently he was expecting to host a Metallica concert in his back yard. That Bram Stoker really was a visionary! Of course, Stoker himself preferred AC/DC, and he would often argue in the Astral Plane with Nostradamus and Dionne Warwick and the other psychics who preferred Metallica or The Dead.

The plan works temporarily, but the snakepires have a counter-plan. They hoodwink Stately Hugh’s butler, and commandeer the record player. Those fiends!

The good guys then need to find another way to generate snake-charming music. They elect to use bagpipes. Conveniently, there’s a Scottish archeologist visiting Stately Hugh Manor. He has his pipes and his kilt with him on his archeological expedition. As we all know, Scotsmen never travel without those things. The snakepires can’t attack as long as the pipes are keening the greatest snake-charming hits. Or maybe the snakepires just hate bagpipe music. I know if I were a snakepire, I would give a wide berth to pipers. I know this because I already give them a wide berth. The bagpipe strategy works, but the good guys can’t be content to merely stave off the evil by charming the snake and his faithful snakepires. That’s only a stop-gap measure. They need a way to defeat the evil. Although they are in the rural English countryside, they somehow come up with a mongoose to release in Lady Snakepire’s estate. I didn’t make that up. About 15 minutes or so after Stately Hugh and the bagpipe-playing archeologist found out about the snakepires, they had rustled up a snake-destroying mongoose.

Oh, yeah, and the bagpiping archeologist also happens to have some grenades. I guess he’s a bagpiping paramilitary archeologist. He drops one of them into the mouth of the titular White Worm when it comes up to eat a virgin, and there you have it.

Tuna said:

The Lair of the White Worm (1988), according to IMDB, and every reviewer I checked, is a Corman-style horror/exploitation film directed by Ken Russell, and most wonder why the hell he made it. They consider it far too normal compared to his usual work. If I saw it as a horror film, I would reach the same conclusion. Several things about it are puzzling, though, if it is to be evaluated as a grade B horror film.

What is the wormpyre (female villain) doing with a home tanning machine in her dusty castle?

Why the Snakes and Ladders board game, or a boy scout being the first victim we see?

Consider this line from Hugh Grant, “I see you like our local speciality. Not everyone takes to marinated earth worms in aspic.”

Then there is the pencil getting a hard-on during the flight attendant catfight fantasy sequence.

When Russell solved the mystery of what Scotsmen wear beneath their kilts once and for all – a mongoose – I finally knew what he was on about. This is a comedy send-up of the genre. Possibly I am bent the same way as Russell, but I love Crimes of Passion, which many think of as one of his lesser films, and I thought this comedy was hilarious. Two virgin sisters run a bed and breakfast owned by Hugh Grant, lord of the manor. Peter Capaldi is an archeologist staying at the B&B and excavating in the front yard, where he finds proof of a convent, then, lower, a worm skull and Roman coins. As Hugh Grant explains, “worm is an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon ‘wirm’ meaning dragon or snake.” Seems there was a famous worm slain by Grant’s ancestors, and wormpyre Amanda Donohoe is a modern day worshiper of the beastie. Donohoe’s bites can turn people into worm food, or other wormpyres.

Words like “campy” and “tongue in cheek” apply here. It is clearly not just a “so bad it is funny” film, in that it has good pace, good performers, and is a very easy watch. Music also helps to make this film. Capaldi uses the pipes to charm the beastie (until he runs out of breath) and the Celtic rock ode to the worm is a masterpiece. Taken as a genre spoof, this is a very good effort. I must temper that assessment by noting that the humor went over (or under) the heads of most viewers, and many reviewers took it too seriously, so your mileage may vary.