House of Whipcord
Monday December 10, 2007 in films | 70s cinema
As somebody who has spent a lot of idle time watching most horror film of the 60s and 70s, House of Whipcord has always passed me by. Made in 1974, it’s such an obscure film that I don’t recall it ever being shown on UK television. It took a recent bout of ‘flu and Amazon DVD rental to get it to fall into my hands.
I suspect that one of the reasons that House of Whipcord hasn’t been seen much on television is because at times it is laughably so low budget. Directed by Pete Walker, who also directed Tiffany Jones – the film based on a Daily Mail cartoon – the cast is full of unknown, and particularly weak, actors. The only faces I recognised were Celia Imrie, usually starring with Victoria Wood, and Ray Brooks, most recently seen as Pauline Fowler’s husband (and murderer) in Eastenders. The film features the amount of mild nudity you would expect in a British “X” film of the early 70s, but unlike the lavish Hammer costume dramas of that era, House of Whipcord appears to be filmed on a whipround from Walker’s local pub.
The film concerns a house that has been set up as a private “correction centre”; girls are kidnapped, imprisoned and punished by wardens who could give Prisoner Cell Block H a run for their money. If you don’t tow the line, it’s three shots and you’re out in the House of Whipcord. First punishment is two weeks of solitary in a rat-infested hole, second a serious lashing and it’s curtains for the third. A young French model (Penny Irving) is taken for Correction, with nasty results, although her pretend accent is so absurd that it’s difficult to sympathise with her.
It’s difficult to get through this film; it’s partly hilarious and partly disturbing. You need to shift down into the right gear, and I was crunching the clutch for ages before I found it. Walker’s message is that taking the law into your own hands will lead to crazy results. He still gets that message across. A bit more thought and budget and this could have been a truly great film. Instead, it’s little more than an oddity, but many of the scenes have a chilling and worrying inevitability about them. And it does lend itself to the dare of the best horror films. The main character doesn’t always get away…
Still worth watching for the terrifying Sheila Keith, who appeared in Walker’s other 1974 film Frightmare, Patrick Barr as the decrepid and blind chess-playing judge, and Ray Brooks’ half-hearted acting, totally unconcerned that a friend of his is about to be murdered:
“Excuse me, is there a prison round here, a sort of house of correction?”
“No, sorry”
“Okay, thanks!”