trioiso.blogg.se

There are other unexplained oddities, which can seem refreshing in an era when every narrative kink has to be explained by a Morgan Freeman voiceover. Where, then, the pleasure? This bit is the more tricky proposition, but stick with me.įor starters, while the film is never truly frightening, Russell conjures up a drugged, nightmare-like ambience which is at times genuinely unnerving, helped by the curious timelessness of the setting, which can't seem to decide if it's set in the 1960s or modern day. Her on-screen sister, Sammi Davis, meanwhile pioneers the technique later popularised by Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery of delivering every line as if read for the very first time from a placard held up behind the camera.

Catherine Oxenberg, newly released from Dynasty, just about keeps a straight face saying lines like, "Oooh, me spotted dick!" in an accent seemingly learned from Tetley tea adverts. Grant, then just 28, does his best with lines like, "Put your bicycle clips on, I'm expecting company" (to his long-suffering butler), though I fancy you can sometimes see a flash of panic in his eyes, as if he's wondering if a 2:1 from Oxford should really lead to this. Capaldi, playing an archaeologist with the hair and glasses of a particularly wet indie-band singer, maintains a touching dignity, even during the film's best-known and most absurd scene, where he runs around a country house playing bagpipes to ward off a chasing policeman turned into a fang-toothed snake/vampire. The overall effect is troubling, not least because the muddled biblical-meets-pagan imagery heaped on by Russell appears to hint at some sort of half-serious intent.įrom his leads he coaxes performances best described as mixed. Ostensibly making a gothic horror, Russell repeatedly undermines the mood with moments of absurdity – some deliberate, many not, and snippets of dialogue apparently borrowed from Are You Being Served? Elsewhere, Russell's snake-means-phallus obsession is just tiresome.īeyond all that, and unlike some so-called guilty pleasures that are trashy but nonetheless well-made, The Lair of the White Worm is undeniably a stinker.īadly shot, clumsily edited and seemingly scored by a teenage boy who has just taken delivery of his first synthesiser and then pressed all the buttons one by one, the film has a peculiarly jarring tone.

This worrying tone crystalises in an almost indescribably strange dream sequence where Grant's aristocratic scion of worm-slayers, Lord James D'Ampton, boards a private jet – don't ask, mainly because it doesn't make any sense – and plays out a scene resembling a video made for an 80s hair-metal band but dropped for featuring too many shots of ladies in stockings. While Capaldi and Grant are the heroes, the female characters are either vamps (strictly speaking vampiric snakes) or trembling innocents, and spend considerably more time in their underwear than necessary. Revisiting the film for the first time in some years – not even Channel 5 schedulers trouble viewers with it these days – I was struck by how, well, guilty a guilty pleasure it is. Lair is adapted from Dracula author Bram Stoker's little-read late novel, and for those who've not had the mixed pleasure of one of the more unsettling 90 minutes in modern cinema, the plot revolves around an ancient monster, as much dragon as snake, which intermittently emerges from its cavern in the Derbyshire hills to feed on humans, and is hunted down by an alarmingly young-looking, floppy-haired Peter Capaldi and Hugh Grant.