"House of Whipcord" is a truly great film so don't be fooled by its appearance. Criminally underrated director Pete Walker lends his amazing hand (and indeed eye) to a premise that could've been a recipe for cheap sexploitation disaster (ie: a group of nubile young girls are stripped'n'whipped) yet instead ends up as an exercise in atmospheric intensity, surreal political allegory and surprising restraint on the blood and nudity front.
To elaborate a tad on the strippin'n'whippin' premise, our heroine is a young French girl called Anne Marie (Penny Irving) who has come to London to do some modelling work for the 'arty' w*** mag Escort. One night at a party she meets a tall, dark, handsome stranger by the name of Mark E. Dessard (pronounced like Marquis De Sade, geddit?), who purports to be a writer and swiftly seduces our heroine in a series of quite moody sequences, including an edgily erotic and actually rather tense scene in which the two go out for a meal together and Mark tests her levels of trust for him. It doesn't take long for him to talk her into coming out to the countryside with him to meet his Mother and before you can say "wasn't the name a dead giveaway?" he's driven her out into a vast Gothic mansion in the middle of Nowhere and abandoned her... Trouble is afoot, especially when she's greeted by the cruel yet almost childlike Bates (portrayed with an unnerving dementia by Dorothy Gordon) who takes her into the grimy, unpleasant depths of the house and demands that she strips. Obviously, Anne Marie is shocked by the request and quite unwilling to do as Bates suggests. However, it doesn't take long before the far more sinister and sadistic warder, Walker (played with supercharged and scary androgynous sex drive by the excellent Sheila Keith) shows the young model the price she has to pay for disobedience.
As the superbly scripted plot unfolds, we learn (don't worry, no severe spoilers) that the house is ran by the clearly very unhinged Mrs Wakehurst (who is Mark E's mum) and the partially blind, senile ex-high court judge Justice Bailey, both very strict puritans who believe that even the slightest breach of 'the law of the land' (in Anne Marie's case, doing "shameless" nude modelling in public) deserves an appropriate punishment.
I know what you're thinking, this all sounds like a surefire recipe for a constant barrage of cheap lines and bad set-ups for explicit sex or OTT scenery chewing. You couldn't be further from the truth however. Walker directs "House of Whipcord" with a very dark, fearsome intensity that appears to come from the heart and a distinct lack of either unpleasant gore, extended whipping sequences or even much nudity. Instead, he concentrates his attentions on the mood, which is bleak throughout most of the movie, framing beautifully Gothic shots through the eyes of nooses (hanging plays a very macabre and unsettling role in the story as it develops) and using his camera to fire up the viewer's mind into imagining far worse atrocities than those actually being committed on screen.
Walker also manages to extract tour-de-force performances from the majority of his cast, not least of all Barbara Markham, who's insane portrayal of Mrs Wakehurst begins by being horribly effective and ends at the point of absolute mania - the final sequence in the film is horrifying, utterly unexpected and genuinely tragic, playing heavily on the deterioration of Wakehurst's mental state that has been building up from the first moment she appears on screen. To compliment the ferociousness of the performances, the mood of the direction and the tragedy of the storyline, David McGillivray's screenplay (based on Pete Walker's original ideas) is loaded with sharp exchanges of words, psychological abuse and, at times, damn near poetic speeches that make the characters believable and, in many cases, downright scary.
"House of Whipcord" goes far beyond your average sexploitation movie of its time and is clearly the work of a man with intentions stretching way beyond his form, or possibly just a man wanting to subvert the conventions of it. Bursting with barbed assaults on the British justice system and attacks on organised religion that would make De Sade himself proud, "House of Whipcord" stands the test of time as an engrossing, beautifully filmed and fierce piece of angry, heartfelt film-making. Highly recommended.
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