By Melissa Antoinette Garza
When updating the website, I realized that I haven’t reviewed too many of Pete Walker’s movies. He’s a favorite of mine. Sometimes, I get so hung up watching my guilty afternoon pleasures, reviewing them is the furthest from my mind.
I had such a glorious time watching Richard O’Brien sex it up in FOUR DIMENSIONS OF GRETA (1973), more times than I’d admit, so I’ve decided to break out an old favorite, HOUSE OF WHIPCORD (1974).
The film opens with Ann-Marie (Penny Irving), a beautiful blonde French model, breaks up with her boyfriend during a photo exhibit, where he shows a distasteful picture of her. Her spirits are brought up again by a mysterious, dark, sexy stranger. This new man, Mark E. DeSade (Robert Tayman), is crazy from jump, but Ann-Marie is intrigued by it. For example, the night she meets him, he flashes a knife. Not only that, he insists she close her eyes and tells her in a hauntingly seductive manner how close she is to the blade. He then runs an ice cube on her cheek, making her believe, he has cut her. She freaks out, but, immediately forgives when he apologizes. I call this the Ted Bundy charm.
TBC or The Ted Bundy Charm is when a guy is horrifically and transparently evil, yet feigns innocence. Often the women know the man is lying, but his charisma and sex appeal creates a dilemma, between the brain and libido. I believe some people, who are diagnosed with Hybristophilia actually are just experiencing sexual gratification from a demented version of the Barnum Eeffect. They enjoy being lied to and just want to go for the ride wherever it takes them, hoping they land somewhere remotely safe.
In HOUSE OF WHIPCORD, Ann-Marie must know she’s in a bit of danger. Though naive, she’s not an idiot. She must know that being alone with a man, who has pretended to slice-and-dice her, while wearing a ring that conjures imagery of de Sade is a dangerous dance with the devil. That said, he is quite nice to look at and offers to take her home to meet the folks that weekend.
Mark’s tone turns darker on the way to his parent’s house. He drives like a maniac and is cold and distant. He ignores her pleas to slow down and when she asks him why he’s doing this, he tells her ‘not to ask questions.’
This is where it understandably goes from excitingly sinister to just full on nightmare fodder, especially, for us wild girls. Mark leaves Ann-Marie. She is then ‘welcomed’ in by a woman, who leads her to a warden named Walker (Sheila Keith). It is at this point, the gravity of the situation strikes and Ann-Marie realizes that this is not an ordinary meet-and-greet with the new beau’s folks. Instead, she is faced with the reality of being held hostage in an illegal private prison. The inmates are disciplined, tortured and sometimes murdered.
The first place, Ann-Marie is taken is to a private court where Mark’s mother Margaret (Barbara Markham) and a judge (Patrick Barr) sentences her for using her awesomely sexy body in amazingly great ways (translation: she posed nude for money). It would be difficult to find a more villainous trio than Walker, the judge and Margaret.
This movie is dark, disturbing, strange and a must-watch. The cast is superb. When watching a Walker film, I’m always on the look out for Sheila Keith. All one must do to see the versatility of an outstanding performer is to watch Keith’s performance in this and THE COMEBACK (1978) back-to-back. Her choices as an actress and how she conveyed the most significant aspects of each role (e.g. motive, mindset, temperament)make for some of the greatest horror sequences of all time.
One thing, I find incredibly odd about this film is some of the reactions from reviewers. People seem to walk away thinking this is a bash on sexuality. The beginning does have a little scroll that indicates just as much. Still, that’s not the moral of this film, at all!
Admittedly, Ann-Marie makes some foolish choices, but being naked wasn’t one of them. She made the classic error of blindly trusting a stranger, especially one that raises major red flags. That said, she’s not the villain and the moral of the story, certainly, isn’t that she deserved what happened to her. Quite the contrary. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes bad people look and act a lot like Margaret Thatcher (RIP). Hell, at times they even share her first name. The point is that sometimes crazy, traditional, censorship nuts go bat-shit crazy and hurt people. Those people suck. That’s the message that I walked away with.
Call me crazy, but I just don’t believe the message is that sexy women should wear more clothes. I’ve seen a lot of Pete Walker movies. I love them. I think it’s safe to say that he’s cool with both sex and nudity. I took this as a big “Fuck You” to the critics, who are trying to stop films like this. As if to say, “you purist assholes, fine, you want, these girls punished. I’ll do it for you.” This movie is punk rock. I love it.
The conclusion is one that would probably never fly today, but then again, so is the entire film.
Scared Stiff Rating: 8/10
