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The Lair Of The White Worm
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Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
DVD
March 6, 2007 "Please retry" | — | 1 |
—
| — | $5.50 |
DVD
October 12, 1999 "Please retry" | — | — |
—
| — | $8.38 |
Watch Instantly with | Rent | Buy |
Purchase options and add-ons
Genre | Horror |
Format | Widescreen, Multiple Formats, Color, Anamorphic, NTSC |
Contributor | Ronaldo Vasconcellos, Ken Russell, Hugh Grant, Chris Pitt, Lloyd Peters, Dan Ireland, William J. Quigley, Sammi Davis, Imogen Claire, Amanda Donohoe, Catherine Oxenberg, Peter Capaldi, Dick Bush, Paul Brooke, Stratford Johns, Bram Stoker, Gina McKee, Christopher Gable See more |
Language | English |
Runtime | 1 hour and 33 minutes |
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Product Description
Product Description
When an archaeologist uncovers a strange skull in foreign land, the residents of a near-by town begin to disappear, leading to further inexplicable occurrences.
Amazon.com
Wittily updated from one of Dracula author Bram Stoker's lesser-known horror novels, The Lair of the White Worm is a camp classic that only Ken Russell could have delivered. It's got all the perversity one expects from the bombastic director of Tommy and Altered States: sensible plotting, intelligent dialogue laced with double entendre, graphic imagery with Boschian intensity, and a mischievous disregard for good taste and decorum. In other words, it's heretically hilarious, especially when skeptical Lord D'Ampton (fresh-faced Hugh Grant, in one of his earliest films) begins to suspect that seductive neighbor Sylvia (Amanda Donohoe, game for anything) is connected to the local legend of a monstrous serpent that feeds on sacrificial virgins. Evidence mounts with the help of a local archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) and two endangered sisters (Catherine Oxenberg, Sammi Davis), and Russell infuses Stoker's grisly plot with his inimitable brand of blasphemy, including a gouged eyeball, a venom-splattered crucifix, Roman soldiers raping nuns (in a delirious hallucination sequence), and some of the funniest one-liners since Young Frankenstein. Prudes beware; everyone else enjoy! --Jeff Shannon
Product details
- Aspect Ratio : 1.77:1
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : R (Restricted)
- Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 0.01 ounces
- Audio Description: : English
- Item model number : 12560
- Director : Ken Russell
- Media Format : Widescreen, Multiple Formats, Color, Anamorphic, NTSC
- Run time : 1 hour and 33 minutes
- Release date : August 19, 2003
- Actors : Amanda Donohoe, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, Peter Capaldi, Sammi Davis
- Dubbed: : French, Spanish
- Subtitles: : English, Spanish
- Producers : Dan Ireland, Ken Russell, Ronaldo Vasconcellos, William J. Quigley
- Language : English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
- Studio : Lionsgate
- ASIN : B00009YXHG
- Writers : Bram Stoker, Ken Russell
- Country of Origin : USA
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #15,471 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #436 in Horror (Movies & TV)
- #1,786 in Comedy (Movies & TV)
- Customer Reviews:
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The Lair Of The White Worm
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“The Lair of the White Worm” starts out like a classic cheap Hammer Films horror movie, but quickly veers off into wonderful Ken Russell loopiness. And gets loopier the further we go into it.
Make that a Hammer film during which the tea lady spiked the oolong urn with some other controlled substance. Definitely an artifact of a bygone happier time. I mean, check out some of these items:
The Concorde! Stewardesses in miniskirts and garters engaged in erotic wrestling. Felt tip pen tumescence. Grand Marnier. Seat belt bondage!
A powder blue triple-wipered E-Type Jaguar, the most beautiful car England ever built! Being driven by a micro-skirted Amanda Donohoe. Displaying her garters while flicking that not-at-all symbolic gear lever.
Amanda Donohoe in tiny black fetishware and black thigh-high leather boots. Amanda Donohoe in thigh-high snakeskin boots and snake-eye shades. Amanda Donohoe naked and painted blue. Amanda Donohoe naked and painted blue and preparing to deflower an understandably reluctant Catherine Oxenberg, using a strapped-on appliance the size and contour of a rhinoceros horn.
Typical Ken Russell hallucinatory Catholic imagery involving Roman legionnaires, nuns, crucifixes and a white snake big enough to give even the band Whitesnake pause. Plus oral-serpent interaction. It’s not the grandest excess Russell ever gave us, certainly no “Lisztomania”, but it is vintage excess, apparently composited on an Amiga. For younger readers, Amiga was a primitive computer from a thousand years ago. It did color!
Which was not a given at the time.
The cast? Well Donohoe has her tongue stuck firmly into her cheek (when her tongue isn’t doing naughty things with snakes, that is) and has a grand time being cartoony evil and frequently clothing-free. By a long slither, she’s the best thing in the movie. Deliciously venomous. Looks pretty good in blue. And even better with fangs.
The other two female leads, Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis, are truly awful. Hard to say which is the more wooden. The ultra-clunky Ken Russell dialog doesn’t make their jobs any easier, but still, both women do sort of deliveries you’d expect in a high school production of “Salesman”. Really terrible, but in a manner that’s maybe supposed to be knowing and ironic, or maybe just bad acting.
Also, I wonder if the on-set recordist was having a hard time, because most of Sammi Davis’ lines sound as if they were re-recorded in a small echoing room, every speech at exactly the same level and all strangely without affect. I mean, whether she’s offering around sandwiches and tea, or talking about the disappearance of her parents and their subsequent reappearance and sub-subsequent….never mind. Her readings are weirdly anesthetized. Like she’d done a whole lot of Nembutal. Oxenberg has a lot fewer lines, but she’s almost as off-putting.
And we have a Dr. Who, Peter Capaldi, looking like he was maybe 18. Brit heartthrob Hugh Grant when he was apparently not old enough to shave. Capaldi gets not a lot to do, except wear that kilt and squeeze that bagpipe. But Hugh Grant is enjoyably smarmy and affects a wonderful insincerity and not a little creepiness. He’s more fun in this weird little movie than ever he was in his Rom-Com heyday.
The Ken Russell….let’s call it “erotic” although I think I’d avoid anybody who found it arousing…. imagery is unfailingly hilarious. Remember that bit in “Alien” when astronauts wearing bulbous spermatazoan-like space helmets clambered into a beyond-suggestively shaped vulvular opening, and traversing a corrugated passage, found a whole mess of eggs? Which then cram themselves down the hapless William Hurt’s throat?
Well, that scene is pretty subtle compared to sight of the great white serpent plunging up the rugose confines of the worm’s passage into the sacrificial altar. I mean, a serious womb’s eye view, there. Or a womb with a view. If you don’t mind two bad jokes for the price of one. Our doughty dauntless Scot rummages under his sporran and extracts a not-at-all symbolic hand grenade. For that matter, this intrepid Scot also rummages in his kilt and brings out a live mongoose. The lad has a lot of room under his tartan, if you know what I mean. And I think you do.
Which does raise the question, where does one scare up a live mongoose on short order? In Derbyshire, no less? Or pineapple grenades, for that matter. But let’s don’t pick nits, not when there’s snakes and ladders and vampires to charm.
Fun factoid: snakes are pretty much conventionally deaf; they perceive sound mostly through vibrations in the ground. A “charmed snake” is actually following the movement of the flute (or bagpipe), not the music. But I loved the image of big speakers mounted atop Hugh Grant’s mansion. Hard cheese for that poor butler, though. Not to mention the hard-pressed mom of the sisters, who gets the Dewey Cox treatment at Grant’s broadsword, with a hilariously gruesome result. And the policeman vs sundial moment is nasty Russell fun, too.
Another fun factoid, there are only four species of snakes in the UK. Three indigenous, one import. Only one species is even slightly venomous. I did not know that. Thanks, Interweb! I didn’t come across any reference to this rebel emperor who was once Donohoe’s (ahem) boyfriend, but there were a whole lot of rebel emperors during and after Roman Britain. So, why not? There are nice articles about the Legend of the Lambton Worm, and I encourage everyone interested to check it out. It’s a mythical romp, although Lord Lambton the Elder does come across as an idle rich thoughtless jerk.
At the country hoe-down, the Worm version of a Chinese dragon is great! In fact, the sets and photography are really pretty good, and the scenes set in “Stonerich Cavern” ( actually Thor’s Cave in Staffordshire) are first rate. Atmospheric as anything, even with the dirty jokes on the walls. The score is surprisingly effective, too, and again, the cavern music is excellent. I’d like to see that cave sometime, it looks great in the movie.
The psychedelic venom-induced hallucinations are a little too hurried and, if you freeze frame, really cheesy. But fun, always fun.
Is “The Lair of the White Worm” high quality cinema? Of course not. Is it eminently enjoyable? You betcha! It’s good dirty fun from first frame to last. Needless to say, I have not read the Bram Stoker novel. I wonder if anyone alive has. I made an attempt at “Dracula” once and gave it up once the piles of verbose grandiloquence and strained metaphors threatened to topple on me. But, I’ve heartily enjoyed a lot of Dracula movies from Christopher Lee to Keanu Reeves. And if there were another “Lair” movie to compare this one to, I’d have a go at that, too. Totally recommended to horror fans with morbid senses of humor.
Top reviews from other countries
Wer sich also über diesen Film, der tatsächlich "uncut" ist, lustig macht, hat nichts verstanden. Das vampierhafte Verhalten der äußerst lasziven Lady Sylvia ist wohl dem Verfasser der Filmvorlage (Bram Stoker; "Lair of the White Worm") geschuldet. Bei diesem "blutigen Namen" spielt es auch keine Rolle mehr, wenn die Vorlage mit Vampiren nichts am Hut hat... Eines aber haben Schlangen mit Vampiren gemein: Sie stechen nicht, sie beißen (Zitat Lady Sylvia).
Natürlich darf bei Russell das Thema "Religion" und Blasphemie nicht fehlen; es wäre aber wünschenswert gewesen, dass die psychedelischen Sequenzen etwas weniger plakatartig, dafür aber schärfer in Szene gesetzt worden wären, da hier die Bildqualität nicht einmal an einen Hammer-Film heran reicht...
Ansonsten ist der Film herrlich schräg und einfach gut.
BEI DIESEM PREIS (UND DANN NOCH "UNCUT") SOLLTE MAN NICHT LANGE ÜBERLEGEN: KAUFEN!! ABER VORSICHT MIT DER LAUTSTÄRKE: DIE DT: SYNCHRONISATION IST ABARTIG LAUT!!