Half-Watching: Lair of the White Worm (1988)

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.

More Fiasco

So we decided to try out the Wild West setting for Fiasco. The first thing I noticed was that the historical/mythic setting kind of makes for a loosey-goosier approach to reality, which was not helped when we dragged a twelve-pound howitzer into the mix. We also played with the character cards from Bang! to add an additional element to the characters, which I'm on the fence about - On the one hand, it gave us ready-made character portraits and a vague sense of personality; on the other it put an additional requirement on the character aside from the two relationships (and a random one at that - the relationships et al. are quasi-random anyway, but there's still that sense of building which just handing out cards lacks). All this may well just be me overreacting to how the system defined my character rather forcefully - that is, by removing his face.

This week's tangled web was set in a small town on the Utah-Kansas border. The players:
Bill Noface (Me): See what I mean? Gunslinger, opium fiend, and horribly maimed by the aforementioned howitzer in a particularly deranged lover's tiff with:
Vera Custer (Matt): Mail-order bride with a Moose und Skvirrel accent and an idiosyncratic interpretation of motherly love. Currently on the run from her orderer/husband:
Johnny Kitsch¹ (Greg): Perpetually drunk Pinkerton², got lost in the desert outside town on his way to deliver justice to:
Uncle Will (Rachel): Kindly avuncular store owner, and twisted gang leader/drug dealer/faith healer/bastard. A real piece of work, this guy. Provides "Chinese medicine" to Bill Noface, closing the circuit.

The first act involved a serious discussion about the exact size and portability of the Howitzer; a flashback to how Bill got his handle in a showdown over Vera's baby that was resolved, naturally, with the Howitzer; Kitsch staggering into town and getting rolled by gang members; Uncle Will sending his goons after Noface and the latter demonstrating that his lack of a face in no way diminished his ability to hand out hot mayhem, only to be arrested by his former romantic nemesis (who didn't recognize him as such, what with the lack of a face and all); a tense showdown at Vera's hideout in the woods in which it was revealed that she'd kept her baby³ , Uncle Will menacing the tot in an attempt to compel her loyalty, and Vera gunning him down in cold blood; Kitsch convincing the drink-sodden Sheriff Perkins of his authority after his badge was stolen and finally Uncle Will crawling to his feet and prising the bullet out of his pocket bible.

With the sheer amount of craziness that went down in that first act, the second was a much more tightly-focused bloodbath, taking place almost entirely in the high street of the town (which, in retrospect, we really ought to have named - the town, not the street, although ideally both would have been good). Bill escaped from jail, met up with Vera and finally asked her the question that had been on his mind for uh, however long it has been: "Did you maim me on purpose or by accident?". The answer was drowned out by the sound of gunfire as Uncle Will arrived to settle some serious hash. Bill Noface died face - uh, front-of-head-down in the dirt, Uncle Will was torn up by all manner of karmic bulletry, and even Johnny Kitsch managed to catch one across his chops. The only one to emerge entirely unscathed was Vera, probably because she was still carrying the baby in a sling (apparently our collective censor wasn't willing to murder the child, but was willing to have him front-and-center at a gunfight and leave him with a mother who'd never been arsed to name him).

The epilogue saw Vera joining up with the Pinkertons and Johnny wandering Europe drinking expensive booze through what was left of his face. I swear there was something about an orphanage, but by that point it was pretty drunk out.

¹ Another thing about using Bang! characters is that a lot of them are goofy puns on various cowboy-related personalities, which could flavour the game in unintended ways. Haven't decided yet whether this is a bug or a feature. Also, it meant that we had a Will and a Bill to keep track of, which wasn't actually a problem since they were PCs and thus more likely to be referred to by the player's names or with the generic "my guy".

² Disappointed we didn't look up the Pinkertons on the wikipedia before playing, if only because of their spectacularly creepy slogan.

³ Although we never did find out if it was Bill's or Johnny's, or indeed if those were the only options.