Ken Russell

  • The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

    The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I clearly wasn’t prepared for the sheer wondrous weirdness of The Lair of the White Worm and seeing Hugh Grant’s in the credits actually misled me further. This is not your Hugh Grant movie of later years: in the hands of legendary director Ken Russell, this is a crazy horror/comedy that goes all-out on grossness, gore, fetichism, and folk horror. Peter Capaldi (!) joins Grant in adding further casting interest to the result, which is really not the film you’d expect. While not a marquee name these days, Amanda Donohoe is probably the film’s highlight as the sultry evil Lady Sylvia. This is the kind of off-kilter work where a dream sequence featuring the film’s two female leads fighting aboard an airplane is the kind of thing that you take in stride. (Plus vampire teeth that look as if they’d lacerate anyone’s mouth in moments.)  It features quite a bit more kink, phallic symbols and nudity than you’d expect from a film of its time and place. The visuals are more daring as well, and the result has this crazy mixture of horror and comedy that works surprisingly well (because it usually doesn’t). You can see why The Lair of the White Worm has earned a bit of a cult following over the decades — I’m probably going to want to watch it again in a year or two just to make sure that what I remember from the film is indeed what happened.

  • Altered States (1980)

    Altered States (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Google Play Streaming, December 2019) As someone who watches way too many movies, one of the best things I can say after seeing one is “Wow, that was weird.”  It doesn’t always link with quality, but it does correlate with memorability. Altered States is one weird movie, especially seen outside its 1980s sociocultural context. Circa-2020 society has plenty of issues, but it does feel as if we’re less likely to believe woo-woo parasciences than in 1980, and Altered States depends on taking these things seriously in order to work. There’s plenty of psychobabble as the film sets up a premise in which American academic parapsychologists start messing with isolation tanks and take heroic quantities of drugs in order to unlock other states of consciousness. This being a thriller, it goes without saying that the efforts are successful and homicidal as one of the characters physically regresses to an earlier species and naturally starts murdering people. The final act is a trip put on film as hallucinogenic visions (as executed by dated special effects shots) represent how the protagonist is slipping in and out of reality, endangering his family along the way. It’s bonkers, and it’s that crazy quality that makes the film compelling even as not a single word of it is credible. According to legend, director Ken Russell and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky clashed during the film’s production (to the point of Chayefsky being credited under a pseudonym), and this tension can be seen in the contrast between the script’s earnestness and the wild colourful direction. If wild movies aren’t your thing, consider that the film has early roles for William Hurt and Drew Barrymore, as well as a turn for Bob Balaban. Altered States is not good Science Fiction: In the biz, we’d call it “not even wrong” for its delirious depiction of science and scientists at work. But it’s an over-the-top hallucination and as such is likely to stick in mind far longer than more sedate works of the period.