The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

And that’s the THIRD film so far in this festival with someone getting cut in half… at least this time it was horizontally, so, hey, variety! I’ve actually read the book this is rather nominally based on, that being Bram Stoker’s final novel of the same name; I remember finding the book more than a little baffling, reading as it did like a posthumously published first draft that was never properly finished, except it was actually published in 1911 before Stoker died. Apparently this mess of a book was what he considered a finished work… Anyway, Ken Russell (no known relation to your humble scribe) got money from Vestron in the late 80s to make a film of it, and the end result was a peculiar film more faithful to the peculiar spirit of the book than its letter. The book was at least partly inspired by the actual legend of the Lambton Worm, though Russell seems to have leaned on that more than the book itself… it’s the depths of rural England, Peter Capaldi’s doing an archaeological dig on the land of Hugh Grant’s local lord, discovering evidence of some sort of snake cult in the area, while Amanda Donohoe’s local ladyship has returned to town to oversee said cult. Visions of nuns being molested by Roman soldiers ensue, because it’s a Ken Russell film so OBVIOUSLY.

The film’s Wiki page cites a critic comparing it to 70s films like Horror Hospital, and I can definitely feel something of that film’s tonal oddity with its uneasy mix of humour and horror in White Worm. I’m not sure everyone in the film was on the same page acting-wise; Amanda Donohoe is clearly having a fun time in what she considered a nice light change from her usual work, while Hugh Grant is oddly wooden (giving absolutely no sense of the romcom star he’d not yet become) and has little or no discernible joint heroic chemistry with Capaldi, whose archaeologist seems to be grumpy and crusty because he’s Scottish rather than for any actual reason. And probably the less said about Catherine Oxenberg the better. It’s a very odd film and yet somehow something about it works, even if I’m not sure what; I think in the end the humour just proves so weird (like Capaldi distracting the possessed policeman with bagpipes) you can’t not laugh at it, and, like the aforementioned Horror Hospital or Psychomania, approaching it as a comedy more than a horror film probably really is the key…