The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

A Bram Stoker horror story starring famous horror hero Hugh Grant.

A Scot, who looks very much like Harold Ramis from Stripes, finds a dinosaur skull in his unduly plain Scottish yard. He notes that it can't be a dinosaur, because it's in a layer of earth no older than 2000 years. It's skull is very long and thin, like a… worm. He's hanging out with a girl who has a very thick British accent.

They head off to a party where everyone is line dancing in American cowboy outfits to Irish country-folk.

A baby-faced Hugh Grant saves his girlfriend from a giant white paper snake by cutting it in half with an oversized sword, thus presenting us the concept of a… white worm. Hugh's fancy girlfriend is skull girl's sister.

There's a whole lot of rapid talking to setup the intertwining plots. Hugh is the rich lord of the manor whose family is fabled to descend from ancient worm hunters. The worm-digging Scot hits on the thick-accented girl while we swiftly learn that her previous boyfriend just died and her dad has gone missing in a cave.

Moments later, the local cop gets randomly bitten by a snake and the fancy lady who happens to be wandering by sucks the venom out of his leg. She has a real cool hat.

In the morning, the fancy lady goes poking around the unlocked and unattended house where the Scot is staying. She steals his worm skull, and then hisses and sprays green acid venom on a nearby crucifix from her suddenly appearing massive fangs. Huh.

Hugh and his girlfriend, dressed as a ballerina, swing by the house. His girlfriend touches the acidified crucifix and has a most incredible vision of Roman soldiers and snake people punching and raping nuns while a large rubber snake wraps itself around Jesus, all in front of a background of poorly animated flames. The scene lasts 10 seconds, and justifies the entire film.

The snake lady picks up a random harmonica-playing underaged youth on the side of the road, takes him home, sleeps with him, and then challenges him to a game of post-coital Snakes & Ladders. He plays his harmonica, which drives her into an apparently unintended dancing trance. She bites him in the groin and drowns him.

Hugh has an excessively long, several minute dream scene of himself climbing into a Concorde and watching his girlfriend and the snake lady fight in flight attendant outfits while he simulates getting an erection with a pen.

Snake lady hypnotizes Hugh's girlfriend in the woods and lures her home to explain the plot to her while inexplicably laying naked in a tanning bed. Hugh's girlfriend sees Jesus on a crucifix and snaps out of it, so snake lady licks blood off of a massive phallic object and sprays her with venom.

Hugh deduces that this is a war between Christianity and a pagan cult, "possibly involving human sacrifice." He comes up with this from the kitchen while drinking tea, nowhere close to any of the snakey events. He heads straight to his father's record collection to find a record of traditional snake charming music, which he blasts from the speakers he keeps atop his palace.

Skull girl and the Scot break into snake lady's house while she's enchanted dancing in the garden. Skull girl finds her mom, but she snakifies and bites her daughter in the neck. This leads to more wild green-screen hallucinations.

Hugh stays home, munching on a bag of Lays, but snake lady comes literally flying in and he has to slice her in twain with the family longsword. He takes this opportunity to have a long phone call with the Scot, who is apparently concerned about vampirism, likely in reference to the moderately more famous of the writer's works.

Suddenly, skull girl is home, and the local cop comes to drive her back to snake lady's house, but now he's a snake-person? And the Scot is playing snake-charming bagpipes in the yard? This is not a hallucination scene, the film actually thinks this transition makes sense. The Scot pokes the cop's eye out and goes bagpiping around the house, presumably looking for where he lost the plot.

He apparently has a live mongoose in his kilt pocket, which is eaten by the naked snake lady – now alive again, and blue – who is wearing earplugs.

He's dragged to the cellar, which is also a cave, and where the two sisters are already held captive in various states of undress. Hugh is leading a tour of cave explorers nearby. If this movie once had rails, it is no longer riding upon them.

A big foam snake puppet arises from the depths to eat Hugh's dangling girlfriend, but the Scot yells loudly, startling the snake lady so she falls into the snake pit.

He tosses a grenade into the snake's mouth. He had a live mongoose and a grenade in his kilt. He also has a bunch of vials of custom-made antivenom. It's not entirely clear when he had time to have that manufactured.

The hospital calls to tell him they sent him the wrong antivenom, and now he's a snake-man. What a ride.