7 - The Lair of the White Worm

    Based on a Bram Stoker novel, a man unearths the skull of a peculiar creature, and a serpent/vampiric woman tries to please her worm deity by sacrificing locals.
    I’ve seen this movie recommended to horror fans several times.  The box art never seemed that interesting.  The plot is peculiar, and it’s hard to explain the tone of it.  But it was interesting enough to hold my attention, and there were a handful of notable sequences.  But even with that, it remains a strange movie that would only appeal to a narrow audience.
    I was impressed with how well the story is set up.  A guy is excavating a patch of ground.  He finds a large, strange skull.  His discussion with a girl gives plenty of clues, but it doesn’t sound like terrible exposition.  This leads to a town party, where a band plays a song that gives all of the backstory we need.  For a setup as strange as this story requires, it was handled very well.
    The villainess is a bit campy, hanging around in underwear most of the time, but she’s suitably evil.
    The really incredible part of the movie is the trippy psychedelic sequences.  It’s hard to describe these.  They mix religious iconography with sexuality, violence, snakes.  There are colors, strangely pieced-together elements… they’re remarkable.  I wouldn’t be as surprised if this type of experimentation was going on during the 60s or 70s, but this movie is from 1988!
    The story is a little thin, but it seems to have a variety of similarities to Dracula, which should be expected.
    I think where the story goes wrong is that the premise isn’t especially compelling to most people.  Some people are scared of snakes, but they probably have a lower phobic population than spiders or… public speaking.  The titular white worm only makes a complete appearance near the end, and it’s hard to feel like it’s a bad thing.  As far as we can tell, it has no consciousness, so it’s hard to blame it for the actions of the followers.