The Lady Vamps THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ken Russell is the movies' version of your dotty old aunt -- the one who lives in a house overstuffed with curios, who natters engagingly about arcane ( matters and who, when you ask for a snack, whips up a feast too big for one tummy or a hundred. Don't tell Russell that less is more; he'll say that too much is not nearly enough. His films (The Devils, Mahler, Altered States) are unguided tours of aesthetic excess. They turn classical composers into heavy- metal hellions, history into ranting nightmare, the Great Books into underground comics.

Bram Stoker's novel The Lair of the White Worm is nothing like a great book, but its outline offers Russell plenty of fodder for his fantasies. An archaeologist unearths the skull of a giant reptile and thus unleashes a pestilence on England's Peak district, courtesy of Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe). In her worship of a humongous subterranean worm, this venomous vamp sprouts fangs, spits at crucifixes, sups on the locals and searches for a sacrificial virgin -- no mean feat, since Russell has set his story in the 1980s.

The snake has all the lines here: "Name your poison," says Lady Sylvia to a toothsome aristocrat. Russell oils the dialogue with lots of slithery images: killer vacuum-cleaner hoses and serpentine watch hands, Snakes and Ladders gameboards and pickled earthworms in aspic. With all the dream demons and succubus seductions, the movie starts to look like a man's fearful scenario of woman's seductive power. Is Russell just kidding or deadly serious? The answer is, as always, both. His campfire tale may be more camp than fire, but it shows the cinema's last angry mannerist in good humor and fine form.