“Fancy praying to a god who was nailed to a wooden cross, who locked up his brides in a convent!”

Mad director Ken Russell was obviously enjoying himself enormously whilst making this film - the sexual imagery is writ large across the screen (for "white worm" read "penis", for "lair" read "vagina" etc) and the references to snakes and dragons are everywhere - from Lady Sylvia's serpentine E-Type Jag to the hose used to clean off the muddy skull.

What starts out as an exercise in appalling accents (everyone seems to have been re-dubbed) and kinky doings actually has a few proper horror shocks towards the end. Lair Of The White Worm is not quite the kitsch travesty you might remember.

Sometimes the Freudian stuff is just a bit too obvious, though - during a dream sequence when Hugh Grant is enjoying the spectacle of Catherine “Dynasty” Oxenberg and Amanda Donahoe wrestling on the floor in air hostess outfits, the red-tipped pen in his hands moves to 10 to the hour (can't think what that's supposed to mean). And of course, Russell even manages to shoehorn in the biggest phallic symbol of them all - an entirely unnecessary Concorde aeroplane.

But there's no denying that the nightmare scenes brought on when anyone is subjected to the worm’s venom are undoubtedly horrific - bloody nuns being raped by Roman soldiers, Christ being savaged on the cross by a huge serpent, more nuns impaled on huge spikes, Vlad-style - all in nasty, over-the-top hues of orange, crimson and blue.

Donahoe's Lady Sylvia is also a formidable baddie, and never more so than when she appears wearing a pair of huge PVC boots and tiny undies and starts giving a Boy Scout a good soaping down. Scout: "I'm not really into headbanging."

"Are you into any kind of banging?" she asks, before getting fed up and biting his nob off.

In the best traditions of Brit Horror it doesn't even have a happy ending, and despite the bagpipes, the final battle is entertainingly violent - featuring people getting chopped in half, impaled through the head and being eaten by a not-totally-unexpected white worm.