MOVIE REVIEW : The Worm Has Turned in Russell’s Kinky ‘Lair’ : The film, based on Bram Stoker’s final novel, is ‘Dracula’ with snake scales. The offbeat comedy screens at UC Irvine.

The monster in Ken Russell’s “The Lair of the White Worm” is a huge squishy thing with sharp teeth and a taste for virgins, or, as one of the characters says, “the closest thing you can find to one these days.”

The monster’s friend is a beautiful woman with reptilian eyes, a hissing mouth and a habit of walking around naked, except for a thin coat of green body paint. She also favors odd fashion accessories, including a yard-long phallus she straps on whenever the spirit moves her.

When these two get together, the sparks fly. Is it love or merely worm envy? Only Russell knows for sure.

“The Lair of the White Worm,” released in 1988 and screening tonight at UC Irvine as part of the “offbeat” comedy series, is another one of Russell’s forays into the realm of lurid kink, jaw-dropping imagery and gleeful excesses. The movie’s really pretty silly (and inexplicable), but it won’t hurt you--Russell shows once again how bad taste in small doses can be fun.

Based on Bram Stoker’s final novel, this is “Dracula” with snake scales (although the beast is suppose to be a worm, he’s more snake-like, as are his flunkies). Russell’s screenplay follows the book fairly closely but modernizes the scenario and tosses in a rash of his customary psychosexual Freudian malarkey.

The setting is England’s pretty Derbyshire countryside where a weird skull has been unearthed by a young archeologist (Peter Capaldi). Strange things begin to happen, especially after Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) arrives on the scene.

She’s the high priestess (or something) of this worm clan, a gang of the undead that spends most of its time searching for sacrifice candidates and acting sexy. At least Lady Sylvia does. Played by Donohoe (who, by the way, is one of the new additions to “L.A. Law”; she’s the one with the lilting British accent), Lady Sylvia is a slinky bombshell who gives new meaning to the description “snake hips.”

In keeping with the horror-movie tradition, she’s out to get everybody, especially local cutie Eve (Catherine Oxenberg), her sister Mary (Sammi Davis), the archeologist and dashing young Lord D’Hampton (Hugh Grant). Once they figure out the danger, it’s open season on snakes and big worms.

Fortunately, Russell keeps the droll gags and bald puns coming. Lady Sylvia says things like “slither on in” when she picks up one of her victims on the highway, and Lord D’Hampton remarks that “there’s another reptile loose on the premises” during a frenzied confrontation.

The assault on Lady Sylvia’s estate and the nearby lair is begun with the help of an old recording of an Indian snake-charmer (Lady Sylvia hears the beguiling tune and emerges, full of lust, from a giant woven basket). Later, the archeologist uses a Scottish bagpipe to quell the monsters and even tosses a mongoose into the fray.

* Ken Russell’s “The Lair of the White Worm” will be shown tonight at 7 and 9 p.m. in UC Irvine’s Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium. Tickets: $4. Information: (714) 856-6379.