The Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell, 1988)

The greatest film ever to feature a hallucinatory flight of macabre fancy, one that was induced by simply touching a wall mounted crucifix that had been slathered with a generous dollop of corrosive green venom, The Lair of the White Worm is a seductive masterwork of perverted deviancy. Mixing rural backwardness with state-of-the-art technology (a character can be seen at one point fiddling with a compact disc*), mythological horror with campy playfulness, and boasting a enough close-up shots of nylon stockings to drive someone who has a fetish for that sort of thing into a hosiery-based stupor, this Ken Russell (The Devils) directed lark, based on the novel by Bram Stoker, is a bizarre trip through the wormy labyrinth of an English town called D’Ampton. It’s true, I could have used a little more dreamlike lunacy and a little less spelunking. But the flame-ridden, gang rape heavy freak-outs we do get were so memorable in terms of impaled nuns, untoward thrusting and prancing snake women with blue skin, that you will no doubt forgive the fact that they’re sparingly employed. The story of two floppy-haired gents teaming up to battle a gigantic worm, and its lingerie-friendly helpers, the film begins and ends with a colossal hole. Genital in appearance, one opening is natural, while the other seems artificial. Of course, the exact details pertaining as to how each hole came to be are not important. (I had this whole tangent that involved a lot of crude wordplay ready to go, but I somehow lost the vaginal fortitude to carry on.)n

What is important is that I mentioned the floppy state of the two male protagonists’ hair. One of the first things we see (besides the hole) is the wind tussled hair of Angus Flint (Peter Capaldi) as he is about to discover the skull of a mysterious creature buried alongside a small collection of Roman coins. Popping into my mind like a thunderbolt as he dusted off his creepy find was the thought: Where’s Hugh Grant? I mean, who is this floppy-haired impostor? Well, apparently this film has two actors with floppy hair.n
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You see, Mr. Grant plays James D’Amption, a so-called “nobleman” who has family connection with the worm in the film’s title, and just happens to have a follicle traffic jam playing out over and over again on the surface of his forehead.n

(I can’t believe I passed on making vagina puns in order to babble incessantly about floppy hair.)n

At any rate, the weird skull found by the archaeologically inclined Scotsman leads James, the Lord with a family history that revolves around fighting large slippery creatures, to come to the conclusion that something strange is afoot. This beckons him to take Angus, along with the Trent sisters Mary (Sammi Davis) and Eve (Catherine Oxenberg), whose parents have disappeared, to search the caves on the out skirts of town. (I loved how their mining helmets temporarily subdued the behaviour of their chaotic hair.)n

Meanwhile, a dangerous temptress, who doesn’t look like a giant worm, is lurking in the woods. She says she has a fear of snakes, but you could totally that Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) was down with reptiles.n

You could also say that Lady Sylvia has a bit of a worm skull fixation.n

Oozing a raw, unvarnished sexual magnetism, Amanda is a sinister delight as the predatory Lady Sylvia. In fact, every moment she was on-screen was a reason to be thankful. Wielding her slender legs with a reckless abandon rarely seen outside your average slab of 1970s-era Eurosleaze, Amanda is seemingly in a constant state of erotic entanglement. Whether lounging in intimidating lingerie or caressing Catherine Oxenberg‘s prestigious calves with a largish worm dildo while lounging (the woman loves to lounge) in a tanning bed, Miss Donohoe seems to relish the opportunity to a play a woman with a serpentine disposition.n

Out of all the stark imagery in The Lair of the White Worm, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of people seem to be drawn the nightmarish temperament of the scenes that are a result someone becoming exposed to the poison coursing through Lady Sylvia’s saliva. I, on the other hand, was immediately taken with Hugh Gran t‘s kooky dream involving Amanda Donohoe, Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis as flight attendants who are not afraid to show off the bluish resplendence of their stockings.n

A Scotsman with a live grenade and an equally live mongoose in his sporran is swell and junk, but I’ll take Amanda Donohoe and Catherine Oxenberg wrestling to synthesizer music in the aisle of a super-sonic jet over that any day of the week.n

The chic clothing Amanda’s Lady Sylvia wears throughout this movie should inspire someone to design an entire fashion line around them, as I have no troubling whatsoever imagining them strolling down the more perversion-centric runways of world.n

Costume designer Michael Jeffery dresses Amanda in a wide array of sexy outfits. My personal fave being the tight brown getup she wore while sitting in a tree. (I’m still trying to figure out how she managed to get up there in those heels.)n

Coming in at a close second was her blue flight attendant uniform. Which, like the majority of looks, is adorned with a pin or broach with a snake theme.n

Her long white coat with a matching three-cornered hat was Lady Sylvia’s introductory outfit, and I must say, it does an excellent job of establishing her unique sense of style. The fact that the many different types of nylons she sports throughout the movie were colour coordinated to fit her many moods was not lost on me. A snake sheds its skin in order to grow, and in turn, so does Amanda’s slithery enchantress.n
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Now, like most people, I tend to wear the same thing everyday (an infrequently laundered pair of black sweatpants and a twenty-year old Front Line Assembly t-shirt). However, in the high end word of Lady Sylvia, changing clothes is second nature. The white nylons of her introductory outfit obviously represent the worm of the film’s title (the film is not called The Lair of the Magenta Worm for a reason). Her brown nylons signify the soil of the earth, which is, you guessed it, the place where worms generally live. And the blue nylons, well, they stand for the large area, known in some circles as “the sky,” that hovers over the soil of the earth.n

You can’t help but notice that none of the other characters in the film have a sense of style that can match Lady Sylvia’s. I mean, floppy hair, gaudy prom dresses and frumpy sweaters can’t compete with the intensity that only a pair of thigh-high leather boots can provide. Yet even though this struggle for fashion dominance ends up being a strictly one-sided affair, to see a character vanquish her foes in one particular field, while simultaneously have their perfectly proportionate ass handed to them from a good vs. evil perspective was fascinating on a number of misguided levels.n
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