A new use for the blog: Keeping track of all the movies I watch in 2014, particularly those that exist at the periphery of my consciousness as I'm watching them, or that I have to leave part way through, or otherwise are half-watched.
I spent most of Lair of the White Worm trying to figure out if the Scottish archaeologist was Peter Capaldi before the ravages of time kicked in, or just a similar-looking guy. Turns out that he was, which I believe makes this movie official Doctor Who canon. It certainly fits in with the modern show: It's relentlessly goofy, grim underneath and has a weird, icky relationship with women. Capaldi digs up a mysterious fossil which is theorized to be the dragon slain by the ancestor of local nob Hugh Grant. The fossil gets stolen by Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe as a scenery-gnawing one-woman cult) who plots to use it to resurrect her dark god Dionin. Since Grant and Capaldi beating up a lone woman isn't much of a movie, she has a handy venomous bite that turns people into her servants after they suffer through some of the most Freudian-ass hallucinations Ken Russell can imagine. There's a lot of to-do about snake-charming music and a subplot about filling tunnels with poison gas that leads to very pretty shots of the English mountains and nothing else, but at it's heart it's a pretty standard Call of Cthulhu-style monster-hunting movie, enlivened by the crazy-ass hallucination sequences. Bram Stoker wrote the original story, one presumes after deciding that Dracula was just too subtle about the dangers of female sexuality; Russell takes that theme and runs with it by way of Cannibal Holocaust and Video Toaster. Recent experiences have given me a renewed appreciation for the interestingly goofy, and Lair meets that criterion in spades.
No comments:
Post a Comment