Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

**** / ***** Lair of the White Worm (1988) is a wicked piece of business from cult auteur Ken Russell, an admitted favorite of mine during the 90s Midnite Movie era of my teenage years. Russell loved introducing blasphemous imagery, shot in this hallucinatory style, often incorporating dream logic to kind of inundate us with a lot to absorb. It can be a bit wild what Russell throws at us, joyfully thrusting upon us shocking visual subject matter often warping Christian history. In this film you have Eve (Catherine Oxenberg) merely touching the venom spit from the enraged “pagan priestess”, Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe, going for broke, deliciously embodying her dedicated immortal serpent cult follower looking to feed Eve, a virgin, to her pig/snake god, Dionin), upon a crucifix nailed to the wall of a room, “receiving” a trip back to when Christ was on the cross, enwrapped by a white snake while Roman soldiers rape and brutalize nuns on the ground who had been kneeling,

*** / ***** I guess you could say Die, Monster, Die! (1965) checks all the boxes. It has its English village tight-lipped and rude-to-the-extreme at the mere mention of the estate an outsider from America (Nick Adams) requests travel to and directions for. That estate has a number of secrets and increasing disturbances that this outsider becomes aware of the longer he’s there. The manor owned by a infamous scientist (Boris Karloff) with a name that is a sour taste in the lips of the villagers not far from the estate tries as he might to persuade the unwanted guest (invited by the owner’s afflicted wife (Freda Jackson), knowing Adams was dating her daughter, played by Suzan Farmer) to leave. The “heath” in and around Karloff’s manor is a magnet for fog, and there are atmospheric  including goodies such as a cemetery and “glowing” greenhouse. There are the portraits of ancestors of the Whitley name hanging on Karloff’s wall up the stairs for Farmer to release their backstories

When I watched  Jughead , Desmond once again involved in Farraday business after experiencing childbirth with his beloved, Penny, and raising a little family away from the all-consuming clasp of Charles Widmore, I was quite excited. Back in time when Farraday told Desmond, still manning The Swan and punching the numbers in the computer, to find him in Oxford—instead only discovering an empty lab where he once worked, meeting a janitor of the school with loose lips regarding what Daniel did to a young woman during his time travel experiments—I was more than a bit curious as to how it would all play out. That Desmond instead goes to the hospital of the victim left behind by a rejected Farraday (later to be employed by Widmore) to see a victim of his handiwork, given the address to his mother in LA (location where the Oceanic Six converge coincidentally (or is it coincidence?)); further adventures involving him seem to be likely. Penny just accepts the mission although Desmond is w