House of Mortal Sin

With her neer-do-well boyfriend Terry having walked out on her Jenny Welch (Susan Penhaligon) needs a shoulder to cry on. Fortunate, then, that she should bump into an old friend in the shape of Bernard Cutler (Norman Eshley). Even more serendipitous is that the young priest needs a place to stay in his new parish when Jenny and her sister Vanessa (Stephanie Beacham) now have a room going spare above their shop.

Less fortunate, however, is the chain of events this sets in motion: Going to see Bernard at work, Jenny gets drawn into confessing her recent abortion to Father Meldrum (Anthony Sharp), a psychopath who has taken it upon himself to purge his parish of sinners like the philandering Terry…

Meldrum follows Jenny and another friend, Bob, home from the pub, believing the young man to be Terry. As Jenny pops out to get her cigarettes, Meldrum sees his opportunity, sneaks in and attacks Bob, throwing boiling coffee in his face. Jenny returns, finds Bob and understandably freaks out, glimpsing Meldrum's crucifix in the darkness before running headlong into the returning Bernard and Vanessa.

The ambulance comes to take away Bob, the incident seemingly nothing more than a bizarre accident.

The next day Jenny goes to see Meldrum and quickly realises the truth. The problem is how to convince the rest of the world, not least Vanessa and Bernard – who are quickly developing feelings for on another – that she isn't being hysterical and that the kindly-seeming old father is the mad one…

Having previously attacked psychiatry and social work in Frightmare and the judicial and penal systems in House of Whipcord, it was almost inevitable that Peter Walker and David McGillivray would soon get around to attacking religion.

It was, however, probably a smart move on writer McGillivray's part to change the focus of House of Mortal Sin's original story from a killer Anglican vicar to a Catholic priest. As he says, the former seems hard to take serious. The latter, meanwhile, besides giving the snappy title, clearly let director Walker tap into memories of a repressive Catholic boarding school education to the film's overall benefit. Perhaps more important, though, were the suitably blasphemous murder weapons that could thereby be introduced as Father Meldrum goes on bash in one sinner/victim's head with an incense burner, poison another with a communion wafer and strangle a third with his rosary.

For a long time the director thought that such content was the reason Peter Cushing, "the gentle man of horror", declined the part of Meldrum when it was offered him, with the more prosaic truth – that Cushing had a conflict of schedules – only emerged when the two men finally did work together on the rather older-fashioned House of Long Shadows in 1982.

But if we are thus denied the opportunity to see what Cushing would done here – and I would speculate an effective combination of his Corruption and The Ghoul characters – Anthony Sharp makes for an adequate stand in, bringing a degree of tragic weight to a role that could easily have been a figure of fun in less assured hands.

Not, however, that Sharp has the film entirely to himself acting-wise thanks to the inimitable and formidable presence of Sheila Keith, appearing in her third Walker production in succession. She plays Miss Brabazon, Meldrum's housekeeper and would-be lover, full of stern demeanour and venom towards his bedridden mother, the woman who prevented him leaving the priesthood for her 30-odd years ago.

Susan Penhaligon likewise acquits herself well as the woman in peril, though Stephanie Beacham is less impressive. The young men, meanwhile, are uniformly weak and ineffectual, although it could be argued that this is at least partly intentional on the filmmakers' part.

At times the film feels like a slasher horror film on account of its woman in peril theme and plentiful use of subjective camera, along with the odd nod to its Italian giallo cousin (in which killer priests were frequently seen, as in Umberto Lenzi's Seven Blood Stained Orchids and Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling) such as Meldrum's penchant for donning black leather gloves before he sets to work.

Against this, however, the film is also more melodrama than murder-mystery in terms of the domestic triangle between the Meldrums and Miss Brabazon; Meldrum's tortured feelings as he progresses towards murdering those who could expose him rather than the guilty per se; or the subplot revolving around Cutler's crisis of faith as he finds himself compelled to choose between the church and Vanessa.

Surprisingly the film generated little controversy in spite of its headline grabbing subject matter. Maybe it's that Walker and McGillivray refused to support any particular agenda, attacking both 'left' and 'right' positions and thereby playing both sides against one another. Or maybe the shock of Frightmare and House of Whipcord's "mischief making" was diminished this third time round; certainly the director's next film, Schizo, was a relatively straight thriller with noticeably less to say about British institutions.

The film's weaknesses, besides the accumulation of plot contrivances, are those common to other low-budget entries of its ilk, particularly an overuse of the zoom lens and other cheap and functional, but less expressive and atmospheric setups. Nevertheless, Walker definitely had a knack for putting together competently made films, on time and on budget and, given that it was his own money that was at stake, it's hard not to feel a degree of admiration for what he did manage to accomplish within these constraints.