You can see the huge set of titles here.
We chose the one where Hugh Grant says "I hear you're having trouble with a snake."
Pagan vampires, a two-hundred-foot worm, and a profusion of phallic imagery collide in Ken Russell’s typically outré take on Bram Stoker’s most infamous novel. On an excavation in the English countryside, an archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) uncovers a mysterious skull that he comes to believe belonged to the D’Ampton Worm, a mythical snake-like creature thought to have been slain long ago by an ancestor of aristocrat James D’Ampton (Hugh Grant). The strange presence of the enigmatic Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) and a series of unexplained disappearances soon hint that the legend of the D’Ampton Worm may be far from dead.
Did we laugh? Of course, we laughed!
Why didn't I see it back when it came out (in 1988)? I loved Ken Russell. "The Devils" was on my list of 5 favorite movies. And, as a law clerk, I'd worked on the case about "Altered States." But I was influenced by the reviews of the time. Which ones, I can't remember, but Roger Ebert wrote:
People expect something special from Russell, whose inflamed filmography includes such items as “Women in Love,” “The Music Lovers,” “The Devils,” “The Boyfriend,” “Tommy,” “Altered States,” “Crimes of Passion” and “Salome’s Last Dance.” Every one of Russell’s films has been an exercise in wretched excess. Sometimes it works. Russell loves the bizarre, the gothic, the overwrought, the perverse. The strangest thing about “The Lair of the White Worm” is that, by his standards, it is rather straight and square.
Not enough wretched excess!
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I'd be tempted by Hugh Grant but it was early Hugh Grant and probably not yet good.
e.g. Two Weeks Notice, the hidden slight zinger
Bullock: You should do the interviews on your own. Harry Raskin, Richard Beck. Interesting prospects for my replacement. Let's see.
Grant: No, it's gotta be a woman.
Bullock: What a surprise. I suppose a certain bust size would help. Maybe some bathing-suit shots?
Grant: It will annoy Howard if it's a woman. -Tell you what. All I want is someone as intelligent as you... ...but a little less tense and argumentative.
I remember that movie. Mostly I remember this terrific song.
First of all, I did not realize Ken Russell did "Altered States" which I loved so much back then, I must have gone to see it 3 times. Crazy stuff. And for a class in which we were studying D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love", I had to sit through his movie version of it which...definitely seemed more intent on the excess part than the story. Or at least, I thought it had at that time. (I've never gone back to view that movie again.)
What case was there surrounding "Altered States"?
There was a time when I loved campy, bad/funny horror flicks. These days I'm more into the dystopian, end-of-world movies that show the end times, either by virus, alien, or some other man-made thing. I do not like those that blame the end times on climate change. Those I find too contrived. Heh. (as if the others are serious works)
We're going with The Conjuring series this year. Quite good, Patrick Wilson (need I say more?), and scary without too many annoying gotcha jumps.
Ken Russell was a filmmaking god when I was younger. I suspect he'd feel pretentious and overwrought to me now.
The 80's to the 90's when the kids were growing up we didn't participate in popular culture. We did see Altered States while we were living in Owens Valley. The neighbors had a VCR. It was kinda creepy. The long walk home in the pitch dark and whistling wind of the high desert was a little spookier than normal. Bill Hurt. He passed not long ago. Psychodellics and saline sensor deprivations... Full circle to Joe Rogan podcast technology for ego death. Paddy Chayefsky upset by the filming of his screenplay, withdrew from the production of Altered States and took his name off the credits, substituting the pseudonym Sidney Aaron.[Dimipedia]
Home Depot is selling a 9' skeleton for placement in your front yard. Or in front of your boss's front door. $300.
We saw The House of the Devil (2009) also on Criterion, last night. It's a period piece, relentlessly so, set in the 1980s, and it has the old Volvos and the Walkman to prove. It was very scary, IMHO, even though the pace is, um, very deliberate. Greta Gerwig does a good job as the loyal and much smarter friend.
Liar of the White Worm is so great! I love its faith in mongooses and snake-charming.
"What case was there surrounding "Altered States"?"
The movie was based on a book by Paddy Chayevsky, and he had a man working with him who had a background in science or medicine (something technical that was helpful). The man had been paid as if this had been "work for hire" — which is a copyright concept — but he sued for recognition as a co-author. Chayevsky would not settle, and then he died, so his wife carried on, feeling bound by her husband's staunch refusal to settle. So the case went to trial, and there was testimony that went through the pages of the book, with the plaintiff saying what part of it was his. Before it went to the jury, however, they settled.
"Liar of the White Worm is so great! I love its faith in mongooses and snake-charming."
That got a big LOL at Meadhouse.
Also... the effectiveness of earplugs and the strength of a woman's grip.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that was the strongest grip in movie history.
When I hear the quote, "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing," I always think of Freddie Mercury or Ken Russell.
In a good way, of course.
I always thought Ken Russell was cheesy death porn. Like The Witches of Eastwick (movie, not book), only with lots of writhing nudity and S&M.
Maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind.
In the beginning the Criterion Collection seemed more like a cultural or critical or educational or archival enterprise than a commercial one. They were built on Bergman, Fellini, and the French New Wave. When they started to package the French commercial movies that the New Wave had savaged you could feel that something had changed. Same thing for Bruce Willis's Armageddon, Sean Connery's The Rock, but yeah, so they're a business, like everything else, not cultural prophets or missionaries.
Ken Russell had two sides, didn't he? There was the wildly insane Russell and then the one who made more or less conventional Hollywood movies. You might want to see a film about Liszt or Tchaikovsky or Mahler and be disappointed at the bizarre result. Russell reminded me a little of that high school history teacher who was great fun but treated everything as a joke. But that's an off the top of my head impression. Maybe most of his movies weren't as bizarre as Lisztomania. I'd like to rediscover his pictures, but I'm not starting with The White Worm. That was too much a farce.
We must have rented Lair of the White Worm when it first hit video, because I remember watching it on TV around 1990 or before. Will definitely watch again…. Pre-COVID, we saw Altered States in one of the rep theaters in NYC. It was a blast to see again on the big screen. I’ll let my husband watch the Dario Argento ones. Or anything with oozing. I always ask him if there’s oozing, which I use as a generic term for a certain kind of grossness.
Wow but the Criteria Collection is amazing. I'm dreading the end of Endeavor, the Queen is dead, and the Mets just broke my heart. Maybe Criteria can help. They have such a functional homepage. It's like a card catalogue.
Just off the top of my head without watching the video or reading the list:
"An American Werewolf in London"
"Reanimator"
"Wolfen"
"Near Dark"
"The Blob" remake from late 80s.
"Nightmare on Elm Street"
"Scanners"
"The Thing" Carpenter remake.
"The Lair of the White Worm"
"Road Games"
"The Hitcher"
"Creepshow" the first anthology.
And looking at the list- yeah "The Hidden" is one I should have thought of- one of my favorites- a truly great, underrated movie.
I saw White Worm in a theater on a first date back when it came out. Not the best idea, I don't think.
(didn't work out btw)
The best horror movie from the 1980's?
Aliens (1986)
My favorite part is when the soldiers are waiting for the aliens to show up. And they are watching the little red blips on the radar screen. And the little red blips are coming closer and closer. And they got that "DUNH, DUNH" sound on the soundtrack, like your heart is beating. And your heart says, okay, I'm gonna start beating along with this noise on the soundtrack. So your heart starts going "DUNH, DUNH." And the soldiers are freaking out cause they don't see any aliens. "Where are they? They're not here." And the guys back in the truck are like, "They're right on top of you!" Now the soldiers are really freakin' out.
What's so cool about this scene is how the illusion of control is stripped from them. You got weapons, you got radar, you got technology, you got brains. You're homo sapiens, your species rocks and you are in control. And all of a sudden you realize your technology is not working. And if your radar isn't working, maybe your guns aren't gonna work, either. Now you're back in caveman times. You have no technology, no weapons, no claws, it's dark and you can't see what's coming. "DUNH, DUNH." Dude. You don't even have fire, man. It's so dark!
My second favorite scene is when Newt drops down into the water. And Sigourney's like, "Newt, stay there!" And Newt's looking around at all the dark water, and she's like, "Okayyyyyyyyy." She's saying it but she's not sure if the grown-ups know what they hell they are doing. I don't like watching Poltergeist right after Aliens cause that little kid pisses me off all over again, whining about thunder and clowns. "Man up, kid! You see what Newt's doing over in that R-rated movie? And she's a girl."
I love the feminism in this movie. At the end of the movie, it's a couple of moms smacking each other. Human mom vs. Alien mom. Awesome.
And finally, what makes this film the scariest? All the humor in this movie. You have a tremendous amount of funny lines to release the tension. "Game over! Game over!" Stay frosty, people.
Scary, funny, scary, funny. It's brilliant.
You can see the huge set of titles here.
Let's take a closer look at those titles.
other great horror movies from the 1980's
Vincent (1982) Tim Burton did this short film while he was at Disney. I think his animated work is fantastic, his best art. He’s a natural. It took him a decade of filmmaking before he made a live-action film as good as his animated work. This cartoon is one of the first things he did professionally. And it’s astounding, a sort of Dr. Seuss cartoon narrated by Vincent Price. It’s an ode to horror, with tongue-in-cheek humor. Even when Burton was just starting out, you can see his mad genius right there at the beginning. You can find this movie on the Nightmare Before Christmas 2-disc set.
Poltergeist (1982). Awesome ghost movie. Best ghost movie ever.
John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). This is a remake of the Howard Hawks' classic, The Thing From Another World. Carpenter is totally a B movie artist but this movie has a good budget and the special effects still hold up well. But the main thing is the paranoid vibe, which is amazing. I think he outdid Hawks, which is hard to do. Good example of a remake surpassing the source material. (The movie starts with foreigners trying to kill a dog and the Americans want to protect the dog -- which is a bad idea because it's alien dog).
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984) So horribly bad, so incredibly good, it's beyond camp, achieving a superstardom of suck that is a pleasure to watch. Ridiculously sublime, moronically brilliant, hilariously stupid. Damn I love this awful awful masterpiece. And forget the bad movie that you make fun of, that ain't what this is. You can't make fun of this movie. You can't mock it. It's unmockable. It's beyond mock. It's beyond everything. Sample dialog:
"Hey, hey, hey. Don't be mean. We don't have to be mean because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are."
"They're only monkey-boys. We can crush them here on earth, Lord Whorfin."
"Take her to the Pitt! Go, Big-booty. Use more honey! Find out what she knows."
"The man's been through solid matter, for crying out loud. Who knows what's happened to his brain? Maybe it's scrambled his molecules! All I'm saying is, Mr. President, let's not panic."
"Evil! Pure and simple from the eighth dimension!"
"Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife. Doomed is your soul and damned is your life."
"Shut up, Big-booty, you coward! You are the weakest individual I ever know!"
"You're like Jerry Lewis, you give me hope to carry on, then you leave me in the lurch while you strap on your six-guns..."
"You can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when it comes right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same. No, no, no, don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
"Buckaroo, I don't know what to say. Lectroids? Planet 10? Nuclear extortion? A girl named John?"
The Fly (1986) Another remake that surpasses the original.
The Re-Animator (1985) The best part of the movie is when the severed head is crawling up the tied up woman's body, and she's like, "don't rape me, severed head, don't rape me!" and the severed head's tongue is sticking out, like "waaaaaaaaaaah!" And severed head is all, "I'm gonna get ya, I'm gonna get ya!" And she's all "Aiiiiiieeeeeeee!" And he's crawling up her body. Well, he doesn't have arms and legs. I don't remember how he moves, actually. Maybe he rolls? But that tongue is so wrong. That's all I'm saying.
Burnt By The Sun
Blades of Glory
That's pretty much all I need on the desert island.
The Evening Standard's movie critic wrote of Ken Russell: "This man must be stopped; bring me an elephant gun."
Anthony: very bad choice for a first date movie. Maybe the worst of all time. Congratulations.
I have a droll, post-production editor friend who is utterly obsessed with the Canadian director Guy Maddin. Ie. Saddest Music in the World. Gorgeous, weird, Vaudevillian stuff. It feels a little bit like work to watch it, but I'm such a pop-culture bottom-feeder, I need a kick in the intellectual pants now and then.
He majored in child psychology in order to map out his life to have some career in the film industry. One of the few people I know who set a goal early in childhood and stuck to it with utter discipline. His father used to take him to movies several times a week, then died of a heart attack when my friend was ten. So, escapism was escape, and it was also honor and ambition. I have great respect for him. I was worried about a sound my car was making once, and he said to me: "My father said that cars always make sounds. The key to life is to know when to react to them."
In college, I let him do one of those tests on me where you put your head in a box and a camera measures your eyes dilating as you quickly scroll through happy and gory images.
At least he didn't become a child psychologist. You have to commit to one or the other.
There are a lot of movies on that list that I've never heard of, but definitely a few greats. "Lair of the White Worm" is high-class ridiculousness, in a good way. But the real prize is "Vampires Kiss," which features Nicolas Cage's most unhinged performance ever (which is saying a lot). He plays a literary agent who thinks he's been turned into a vampire, but is probably just nuts.
It just occurred to me that there was probably some symbolism in Fatal Attraction.
(the rabbit died)
Saint Croix,
Yeah, definitely "Aliens" and "Poltergeist".
Also, "Return of the Living Dead." Not associated, I think, with George Romero, but with one of his co-writers.
"Liar of the White Worm"? Bill Clinton bio?
Not many of those sparked my interest, but many in the Vampires collection did, particularly A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, described as an Iranian vampire western. Mark Kermode provides a good overview of it.
The Hidden is a fun SF horror thriller.
The Keep is very Stylish.
Hey, the "372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" podcast covered the Bram Stoker book Lair of the White Worm, check it out: 372 Pages - Ep. 55: A Very Special Mongoose
It's a funny podcast by Mike Nelson and Conor Lastowka of MST3K and RiffTrax where they read bad books. The White Worm episodes are 55-58; lots of snake, mongoose, and kite (the toy, not the bird) discussion as I remember. They have a distinctly midwest perspective that Prof Althouse might like.
Oh, also, also!
The woman who plays Lady Sylvia in Lair of the White Worm is Amanda Donohoe who plays Steven Toast's ex-wife on the hilarious Toast of London
Toast himself is played, of course, by the fantastic Matt Berry who is a lead in both Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and the TV show of What We Do In the Shadows if you need some horror-themed comedies.
Nothing good on that list except Vampire's Kiss which is good in a Nicolas Cage kind of way. That's fine for me but I don't know about you.
I'd try The Hidden just because I've never seen it and I notice from the thumbnail that Kyle Maclachlan is in it. Might be interesting.
There are a lot of "interesting" choices there, and if that sounds condescending, it's meant to.
Apart from Criterions, the '80s offer Ghost Story (1981) and The Howling, and a little-known horror-comedy Out Cold with John Lithgow and Teri Garr. These I recommend.
I'm not a horror buff. Could you tell?
I just saw Ted's comment above, about Vampire's Kiss -- "features Nicolas Cage's most unhinged performance ever" -- and I was about to say, What, you haven't seen Mandy?
Then I had second thoughts: What, you haven't seen Bad Lieutenant? What, you haven't seen Dog Eat Dog? What, you haven't seen fill in the blank... Dude's fearless, gotta love him.
Russell's last short film is on YouTube: A Kitten for Hitler. It's the kind of comic idea that usually ends up in the trash can, even maybe at SNL.
Criterion is great.
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