Expelled from the prison service for her Victorian-style views on how offenders should be treated Mrs Wakehurst (Barbara Markham) has set up her own house of corrections for young women whom she feels the courts have treated too leniently.
One such is Ann-Marie di Verney (Penny Irving) a young French photographic model who has just escaped with a ten pound fine for doing a nude photo session in Kensington Park.
At the launch party for the men's magazine *cough porno cough* in which the shoot appears, Ann-Marie meets the mysterious Mark E. Dessade – yes, it's a bad joke, but at least Ann-Marie says the name reminds her of someone and asks the man, who plays dumb, if he has ever heard of him – who seems like another permissive society swinger but has in reality been sent by Mrs Wakehurst to facilitate the young woman's incarceration.
Dessade invites Ann-Marie away to visit his parents in the country but on arriving at the suspiciously stern looking, high walled house the door is unexpectedly slammed shut and two stern-faced warders (the magnificent Sheila Keith and Dorothy Gordon giving her a good run) appear and order her to strip.
Nonplussed, Ann-Marie reluctantly complies. Thrown into a cell, she learns the ropes from another inmate, jailed for shoplifting: First strike and it's solitary. Second strike and it's a whipping. Third and you hang…
Will Ann-Marie escape before her three strikes are up? Will her friends realise the truth about the man who just showed up at their party? How long till the whips come out? Will we get a girl-girl catfight? A lesbian shower scene?
You've got to admire Pete(r) Walker for giving British exploitation cinema a much needed shot in the arm in the late 60s and early 70s, giving a distinctively British twist to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre style gore/cannibal film with Frightmare, the giallo with Schizo and the WIP film with this 1974 entry.
Unfortunately away from the incidentals – spot the familiar British TV faces, gaze in shock and awe at the fashions and styles on display and admire the gall of Walker in calling his company Heritage Films – House of Whipcord is just too downbeat to work as an enjoyable exploitation experience.
It's not so much the cheapness and grottiness of the atmosphere, which are de rigeur for the WIP genre, more that there's little real sense of irony or parody to the proceedings beyond the opening title dedicating the film to those who await the return of corporal and capital punishment.
Many of the scenes are just a touch too harrowing and straightfaced to be any fun – note we don't get any girl-girl action to lighten the tone and give the raincoater crowd what they expect – and the film's greatest shock moment [spoiler] – when Ann-Marie, whose plight we have come to identify with, is unceremoniously killed off about two thirds of the way through, leaving it up to her flatmate to solve the mystery – [/spoiler] is a real punch to the gut.
But what is lost in entertainment value is gained in impact, with the absurdity of the law and order faction's position and their desire to turn the clock back being made all the more apparent, even if Walker and his co-collaborator David McGillivray would likely downplay any notion of social commitment – as distinct from doing their best to annoy Mary Whitehouse and her ilk and of pushing the boundaries whilst always being sure to remain commercially and legally viable – to their work. (Compare, for instance, with John Jensor Lindsay repeated run ins with the authorities at the same time as he sought to establish hardcore porn in the UK context.)
In sum, more for the social historian than the WIP fan perhaps, who would be better served by Jack Hill or Jesus Franco.
This Region 0 DVD from Redemption looks pretty bad. Presented open matte – the film was shot in 1.37:1 but then released in 1.85:1 widescreen, so one is actually gaining rather than losing information here – the problem is not so much the damage and grain which are as one would expect, nor the predominantly drab, unpleasant colour palette that the film-makers have used but the sheer darkness of the visuals. While occasionally these work to the film’s advantage – Walker has a nice way with framing a face in the stygian gloom – their general effect is to make it difficult to actually tell what is going on a lot of the time.
Sound is fine if inevitably unimpressive.
The extras comprise a trailer, worth seeing for the way in which it sells the film, and a small gallery of promotional materials, too indistinct to be of real value.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
Rating:
4.0 / 5
(1 vote)
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