After a winter break, we welcome back our honoured guest programmer Jeffrey to our concrete hearts as he will present our devoted audience with a screening of a cult horror classic from the late eighties: Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm. As Jeffrey eloquently notes: ‘This is a totally off-beat Ken Russell flick, made towards the twilight of his career and based on a 1911 story by Bram Stoker (who wrote the original Dracula). The visual style is typical bombastic Russell, a vertigo of dazzling images, all rushing at the audience with a blinding speed. You often feel like you are in a vortex, with events firing off faster than you can comprehend them. This is a journey into another world. Where most horror films have an enemy with a few exceptional qualities, in this one we are thrown into an onslaught of total otherworldliness. But at the same time, it isn’t a flick that takes itself too seriously, it is packed with camp, kitsch and black humor. At the time this movie was made director Ken Russell was being pushed out of the industry. He worked with what he had, and he replaced cash with imagination. Many of the special effects are chintzy, and that is something you have to embrace to enjoy this roller-coaster ride of a film.’
Starring a baby-faced Hugh Grant, a young Peter Capaldi, the Serbian-American actress Catherine Oxenberg along with the wonderfully flamboyant Amanda Donohoe.
Doors open at 20:30, film starts at 21:00
As always, the screening is free, but cash donations are very welcome to keep the Vondelbunker running and to quench your thirst so you won’t feel obliged to drink the vein gravy from your fellow film connaisseurs.