House of Whipcord

House of Whipcord is a 1974 British exploitation thriller film directed and produced by Pete Walker and starring Barbara Markham, Patrick Barr, Ray Brooks, Ann Michelle, Sheila Keith, Dorothy Gordon, Robert Tayman and Penny Irving. The film was Walker's first collaboration with screenwriter David McGillivray, who went on to write a further three films for him. It also marked the horror film debut of actress Sheila Keith, who went on to star in four more films for Walker.

Plot
The film opens during a night-time thunderstorm when a frightened, confused and disheveled young woman runs down a country road and is picked up by a trucker. We see through flashbacks how the young woman came to be in such a situation.

While at a gathering in a London art gallery, naive French model Anne-Marie DeVernet is shocked to see that her photographer boyfriend is exhibiting a recently-shot photo where she is seen being arrested by the police for public nudity. Humiliated, Anne-Marie dumps the photographer but soon finds solace in enigmatic fellow partygoer Mark E. DeSade, who offers to take her to his isolated country estate to escape the scandal her now ex-boyfriend has caused her.

Unfortunately, Anne-Marie soon discovers that Mark is a procurer of young girls for 'moral correction' by his sadistic mother, ex-reform school matron Margaret. Years earlier, Margaret was brought to trial when her corrupt reign over a girl's reform school led to the suicide of a young French girl under her charge (although in truth, Margaret murdered the girl and made it look like a suicide).

Found not guilty but dismissed from her job in disgrace, she seduced the High Court Judge who heard her case. The judge, critical of the 'permissive society' of the England of the 1960s and 70s, nevertheless left his wife for Margaret, who bore him a son (Mark) who worked with her to turn their mansion home into a secret illegal prison for 'morally corrupt' and 'delinquent' young women, complete with a group of tough female wardens who administer a harsh regime of corporal punishment upon their prisoners. However Mark and the now retired, blind and senile judge are oblivious to the fact that Margaret is in fact using the prison to torture and ultimately execute these young women upon them gaining three 'demerits' during their incarceration.

Anne-Marie soon falls foul of Margaret's cruelty as she reminds the evil matron of the charge she killed and whose death cost her her career and reputation. Meanwhile, Anne-Marie's concerned flatmate Julia and Julia's boyfriend Tony track down Mark, who has now discovered the full extent of his mother's murderous deeds at the prison after seeing her minions dispose of a prisoner's corpse.

Anne-Marie makes multiple escape attempts, but is recaptured every time. Her friends eventually find the prison, but too late to save her. She has been hanged after earning a third 'demerit'. As the police arrive Mark confronts his mother and is killed by her. Margaret, knowing the game is up, then kills herself with the same noose she set up for Anne-Marie, as well as the other prisoners. The judge and his wife's henchwomen are arrested, and the surviving prisoners are freed.

Cast

 * Barbara Markham as Margaret Wakehurst
 * Patrick Barr as Justice Bailey
 * Ray Brooks as Tony
 * Ann Michelle as Julia
 * Sheila Keith as Walker
 * Dorothy Gordon as Bates
 * Penny Irving as Ann-Marie Di Verney
 * Robert Tayman as Mark E. Desade
 * Ivor Salter as Jack
 * Karan David as Karen Vaughan
 * Celia Quicke as Denise
 * Ron Smerczak as Ted
 * Tony Sympson as Henry
 * Judy Robinson as Claire
 * Jane Hayward as Estelle
 * Celia Imrie as Barbara
 * Barry Martin as Al
 * Rose Hill as Henry's wife
 * Dave Butler as ticket collector
 * David McGillivray as Cavan (uncredited)
 * Denis Tinsley as Police Sergeant (uncredited)
 * Pete Walker as cyclist (uncredited)

Production


The film was shot on location in London and the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England during the summer of 1973. The prison in the film was Littledean Jail, Littledean, Gloucestershire.

Release
The film opened at the London Pavilion on 28 March 1974. In the United States, House of Whipcord was distributed by American International Pictures. In 1975, AIP reissued it under a new title, The Photographer's Model, in a double feature package with Thriller – A Cruel Picture (1973) re-titled Hooker's Revenge.

Critical reception
The British Film Institute's Monthly Film Bulletin reviewed the film at length, writing: House of Whipcord charts the dark side of the Festival of Light with a pop-Freud vengeance. Here the prison wardens are a manly, repressed lesbian and a frigid would-be mother; the: 'arresting officer' is an Oedipal sadist; and the lady governor a drink-raddled Fundamentalist, succumbing to her persecution traumas and struggling to rid her system of its last vestiges of reason, upheld by her protesting but senescent former lover. The foundations seem laid for another Horror Hospital [1973], but Pete Walker, following David McGillivray's no-nonsense script, has chosen to play it straight; the result is both his own best film to date, and one of those rare psychological horror movies that fits more in the line of Michael Powell's near-brilliant Peeping Tom [1960] than of Hammer's maniacs, paranoiacs and the rest. The prison scenes, dressed in uniform Protestant grey and heavy with shadows, move in diminishing circles through the claustrophobic rooms – cells, corridors, courtroom, cellar – to create a small labyrinth, inexorably centring on the death cell, where the climax naturally occurs; the characters – jailers and victims – act out the psychopathology of prison rituals so baldly that the action delivers quite frequent moments of real anarchy, genuinely close to de Sade in spirit. The plotting compounds the cycles of oppression by having the heroine attempt to escape three times and succeed on the third, only to be delivered straight back to the prison by the well-meaning lorry-driver. Even the obligatory cut-away scenes of life outside – for all their bright colours and relatively snappy pacing – reinforce the mood by emphasising indolence, apathy, cowardice and duplicity. The whole film works primarily as a mood piece, in fact, since neither director nor writer seems to have much interest in form; sexploitation raises a tremulous nipple here and there, but most scenes are starkly committed to expressing feelingsof pain, suffering, obsession and futility. Extraordinary, of course, to find such emphases in an essentially commercial exploitation movie. The film's release valve is its matter-of-fact quality, which it shares with Walker's sex films; here, all the horrors are a short train-ride from a naturalistic world of middle-class adultery, Marks and Spencers and chintzy restaurants oozing muzak. Everything is very English, down to the self-apointed judge, jury and executioners, who are just a few more lovable eccentrics who have carried things too far. The film's real focus is on the salt-of-the-earth lorry-driver, the most obviously 'normal' character. "Who did this to you, my lovely?" he asks, alarmed to discover the horrendous weals on Ann-Marie's back. "He deserves to swing for it."

Allmovie called it a "disturbingly effective horror film", writing that "Many viewers will be offended by the film's repressive right-wing tone, but its genuine scares and creepy atmosphere will outweigh its philosophical offenses for most horror fans."

Halliwell's Film Guide described the film as a "low budget psychological horror that stylishly achieves its object: to disturb", and quotes Derek Elley in Films and Filming: "Shows that something worthwhile in the entertainment-horror market can be done for the tiny sum of £60,000".

David Pirie wrote in Time Out: "An above average sexploitation/horror that has been put together with some polish and care from a fairly original script. The film is dedicated ironically to all those who wish to see the return of capital punishment in Britain, and it's about a senile old judge and his wife who are so appalled by current permissiveness that they set up a gruesome house of correction for young girls. The only trouble is that the film undercuts its potentially interesting Gothic theme by some leering emphases, and the final result is likely to be seen and appreciated only by the people who will take the dedication at its face value."