MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

LeonLouisRicci Director and Cult Favorite Ken Russell is on the loose, so scurry away the Children and Enjoy this Guilty Pleasure. Fans of Russell need no convincing of His unbridled Talent and willingness to be seen as a Maverick and routinely Pokes Fun at Himself and Critics with Gleeful Abandon.No one makes Films quite like Him and therein lies the Appeal. This is a full blown, Sex-Fest with Mysterious Overtones and over the top Glitz. It's quite a Visual Treat and includes familiar Hallucinogenic Hubris with the usual Religious Bashing for that the Director is well known.The Movie is Tons of Fun and if You are a Prude please move on and allow the Artistic Freedom to Flourish and Flourish it does. The Film is Never Boring and moves like a Reptile from one Slithering Scene to another with its Charms.The Cast is as Oddball as the Film with Hugh Grant and Amanda Donahue delivering. The SFX are done on the Cheap and Cheap hardly ever Looks this Good. There are some Stunning Locations and the Lair of the White Worm is a Gargantuan Cave dwelling that is as Impressive as it is Ominous.A Campy, Cult, and Captivating Exercise in Sex, Symbolism, and Sleaze that is an Unforgettable Experience. In fact, most of Ken Russell's Movies are Unforgettable.

Adam Peters (40%) A film that only Ken Russell could have gotten away with as it's so campy, over-the-top, and silly, yet it's still oddly worthy of a look, which for a film staring Hugh Grant is really quite rare. The plot works as well as an inflatable pin cushion and is best just letting it go in one ear and out the next, the characters are have little to no depth, while on the other hand the performance from Amanda Donohoe is worthy of a watch alone as she largely semi-nakedly vamps the movie up to eleven. For a horror film this isn't frightening in the slightest, and I doubt it was ever really made with the sole intention to scare, rather to entertain. This really isn't a must watch at all, but there is some fun to be had here if you can catch it.

Dave from Ottawa Ken Russell is an acquired taste at best, but here his patented over- the-top religious hysteria finds an appropriate muse with Amanda Donohoe as the last member of a snake cult who kills passers-by to feed her pet Reptile God. Hugh Grant and Catherine Oxenberg co-star as a young couple caught up in her web. Hugh is charming and atypically serious, with none of the stammering, gibbering silliness that later became his trademark, and Amanda Donohoe shifts gears beautifully from evil seductress to seemingly innocent neighbor, creating great comic moments when accidentally caught between gears. The movie has a great dreary look thanks to its setting in rural northern England, which creates a wonderful visual contrast to Amanda's exotic, white marble vampire's nest. The movie deftly mixes scary visuals and winking silliness as the movie's twin horror plots start to entwine one another (like snakes in a caduceus) - locals go on the hunt for the monster snake, while victims of Donohoe's bite start turning into undead zombies! Kooky fun; this is a very unusual movie that can be watched again and again and still enjoyed.

MARIO GAUCI I still recall this film's local theatrical release but never got around to watching it until now (not even as a VHS rental), due to my personal phobia of snakes! Actually, I did acquire a copy of it some years ago sourced from the Artisan DVD and, subsequent to this satisfactory viewing, presently also got hold of Ken Russell's cheeky Audio Commentary (where he states that the garden of his home, where this was partly filmed, is crawling with snakes and also that, as a child, he had been "hypnotized" by an adder but was saved from certain death by his brother!) culled from a previous Pioneer edition! Although there are indeed reptiles involved – including the giant titular one – there is, thankfully, a curious restraint on display here on the part of the notoriously in-your-face director…so much so that it is often dismissed as a minor effort of his in some circles. Curiously enough, I have also seen it acclaimed as his "ultimate" achievement in others: maybe it was the fact that he was venturing once more into the realm of the fantastic (in almost a decade) and combining it with the erotic that instigated the hyperbole or perhaps merely that he was adapting for the screen a Bram Stoker property (only the third novel to receive this treatment but, unlike the others, just this once)! The film proved the first teaming of Amanda Donohoe and Sammi Davis who would be reunited as one pair of lovers in Russell's next film, THE RAINBOW (1989), that I watched earlier this month; here, however, the typically (and quite literally) vampish Donohoe is more interested in the latter's equally virginal sister Catherine Oxenberg (from TV's DYNASTY) – while she used to be a striking presence in that long-running soap opera, she is decidedly the weakest link in the cast that also includes a pre-stardom Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi. At times, Stanislas Styrewicz's eerie electronic score was very reminiscent of the unnerving Bernard Parmegiani one for Walerian Borowcyk's DOCTEUR JEKYLL ET LES FEMMES (1981); the evocative cinematography of the English countryside, Gothic mansions and prehistoric caverns by Russell's regular lighting cameraman Dick Bush was another big plus – although the tackiness of the nightmare sequences (that look forward to the harshness of camcorder images!) were a bit jarring if effective nonetheless.The reptilian-cum-phallic imagery was unsurprisingly rampant – from Donohoe's car slithering out of nowhere to a hosepipe or a piece of rope suddenly springing into life, to the Concorde in Grant's nightmare (complete with his erectile pencil at the sight of a catfight between air hostesses Donohoe and Oxenberg!). Admittedly, the unnecessary twist ending was a bit lame but this was compensated for by a reprise of the worm's wittily catchy theme tune sung by a folk-rock band over the end titles; they had earlier performed it at Grant's annual 'beggars banquet' commemorating (with a shoddy re-enactment) his ancestor's heroic slaying of the mythical dragon (by the way, it is baffling how the script seems to think that dragons, worms and snakes are one and the same thing!). As I said, THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM was only Grant's fourth theatrical feature but, in a case of life imitating art, at one point his character is said to have been jailed (in an unsuccessful ploy to abduct the heroine)! Among the film's highlights are: Donohoe spewing venom on the crucifix; a vision of Christ on the Calvary cross being entangled by the white worm as Roman legionnaires are gleefully raping a host of nuns (including Oxenberg herself); Donohoe's bath-tub murder of a boyscout (following a game of "Snakes & Ladders"!); the girls' mother cut in half by Grant via his ancestral sword (incidentally, it was amusing to see the snake people like the former watching TV programmes about this form of reptile). However, the camp quotient is at its highest in Donohue's costumes and in a sequence depicting her slithering out of a snake-basket over to Grant's mansion to the stereophonic strains of a Turkish "snake charming" tune blasted over his sound system (even if Scottish Capaldi uses the traditional bagpipe just as effectively but, while 'afflicted' policeman Paul Burke answers the 'call' and is eventually disabled by a graphic piercing right through his left eye, Donohue has cleverly put ear-plugs in advance and she also swiftly eliminates the threat of a mongoose, reputed to be the snake's deadly enemy!); the climactic confrontation in the cavern with a naked, blue-painted and snake-dildo-sporting Donohoe attempting to assault a tied Oxenberg before the White Worm makes its untimely appearance (the sacrificial victim it receives is not quite the one that was intended, with Capaldi then resorting to a hand-grenade in the mouth to put the monster to rest). Apart from the two female leads, of Russell's stock company, Christopher Gable (as the girls' missing father – in fact, he turns up only in photos and in Grant's nightmare!) and Stratford Johns (as Grant's butler who, asked about the whereabouts of the all-important snake-charming tune, helpfully suggests that his master try the B-side of a disc boasting "belly-dance music") also put in an appearance.