The skull of the pagan god was built by adding sculpted sections to a real cow skull with fabricated teeth.

The phallic symbolism was not subtle. The teapot spout, the garden hose, the vacuum cleaner hose, the Jaguar headlights pushing through the fog - Ken Russell ensured that every inanimate object in the film was doing double duty.

"Audiences don't realize my films are comedies until the last line has been delivered," Russell said, "and even then, most people don't appear to get the joke."

THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988) adapts Bram Stoker's 1911 novel - one of the least coherent things Stoker ever published - into something at least as coherent as the source material.

The cast includes Hugh Grant in one of his earliest films, playing a floppy-haired English lord with a hereditary obligation to fight serpents.

Amanda Donohoe is the snake-woman priestess Lady Sylvia Marsh, in thigh-high leather boots, doing things with a crucifix that guaranteed certain audience segments would be offended.

Peter Capaldi, who would later play the Doctor in Doctor Who, is the Scottish archaeologist who unearths the skull that sets everything in motion.

Russell wrote the screenplay himself. At one point during production, he had two crews shooting simultaneously on different soundstages: one filming a woman about to be sacrificed to a giant underground worm, the other filming a convent of nuns about to be attacked by Roman soldiers in a hallucinatory vision sequence.

Russell described the production as "never a dull moment."