Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: 1970s
House of Whipcord (1974) marks a monumental moment in cult cinema: it’s the very first collaboration between Walker and screenwriter David McGillivray (who would go on to give us Frightmare, House of Mortal Sin and Schizo). It also marks the horror debut of the legendary Sheila Keith, an actress who would become Walker’s ultimate secret weapon, playing unhinged, stern-faced matriarchs with a terrifyingly polite composure.
Released in the U.S. by American-International Pictures (sometimes double-billed as The Photographer’s Model alongside Thriller: A Cruel Picture as Hooker’s Revenge), this film takes the classic women-in-prison movie and transplants it to a freezing, rain-slicked English country estate. We open in media res — using terms like this makes me a real critic — during a roaring thunderstorm. A terrified, disheveled young woman named Anne-Marie (Penny Irving) comes sprinting down a pitch-black country road before being rescued by a passing trucker.
Let’s rewind, and we soon discover she’s a naive French model living in London. At a trendy art gallery party, she’s mortified to find that her photographer boyfriend has publicly exhibited a photo of her being arrested for public nudity. She dumps him on the spot, only to be seduced by a brooding, enigmatic stranger named Mark E. DeSade (Robert Tayman), who promises to whisk her away to his family’s quiet countryside mansion to escape the scandal.
Mark isn’t a romantic savior; he’s a scout for his sadistic mother, Margaret Wakehurst (Barbara Markham), a disgraced former reform school matron. Decades ago, Margaret murdered a young French girl in her care and covered it up. Though acquitted, her career was destroyed. She seduced the blind, senile High Court Judge presiding over her trial (Patrick Barr), and together they built a secret, illegal prison inside their estate dedicated to morally correcting the bad girls of swinging 70s London.
Guarded by stern female wardens, including the sinister Walker (Sheila Keith)—the prison operates on a brutal three-strike system. Strike one and it’s two weeks in solitary. Strike two is forty lashes. And strike three, there’s no hope. You have to hang at dawn.
As Anne-Marie suffers under Margaret’s grudge, her roommate Julia (Ann Michelle) and friend Tony (Ray Brooks) scramble to track Mark down and uncover the horrific truth before the third strike falls. Bad news — and a spoiler — as they’re too late. She’s swinging in the British wind, Mark has confronted his mother and been killed by her, and as for the head of this place, she’s decided to hang herself. Too bad the blind judge has no idea what’s happening.
Pete Walker movies don’t end with everyone laughing.
House of Whipcord is a bleak, atmospheric masterpiece of low-budget British exploitica. Filmed for a mere £60,000 on location in London and at the real-life Littledean Jail in Gloucestershire, Walker makes every frame feel cold, damp and claustrophobic. What makes the movie work so insanely well is that it takes its absurd, conservative-reactionary premise entirely seriously. It plays out like a dark satire on the Festival of Light and the anti-permissive moral outrage of the 1970s, taking the right-wing crusade against mini-skirts and free love and turning it into an actual fascist death camp run by lunatics.
The flick took an absolute pounding from critics who mistook it for a far-right sermon. They completely missed the joke, blinded by director Pete Walker’s delightfully subversive opening dedication: “To those who are disturbed by today’s lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment.”
You can watch this on YouTube.
