Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of whipping noises, not much shown, November 18, 1999
By A Customer
There's just this one scene where one of the evil butch attendants opens a cell door and you get a view of a recently-whipped blonde's back with whip marks. A little nudity here and there, a hooded hanging, clothes on. Other than that, no action worth mentioning, if that's what you're looking for (why the heck else would you want this turkey except for that?).
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Low-key shocker with sleaze to spare, January 25, 2002
"House of Whipcord" (1974) marked British director Pete Walker's first collaboration with legendary exploitation scriptwriter David McGillivray ("House of Mortal Sin", "Satan's Slave", etc.), and they both derived inspiration for their introductory barnstormer from a pre-determined ad campaign showing a screaming, half-naked starlet framed by a hangman's noose. The result is a minor classic in which a French exchange student and part-time nude model (Penny Irving) is lured to a lonely old house in the English countryside by her creepy new boyfriend (Robert Tayman, from "Vampire Circus" [1971]). There, she's imprisoned by Tayman's parents - a senile old judge (Patrick Barr) and his crazy wife (Barbara Markham) - for 'crimes against morality', and she plots escape with her fellow inmates whilst suffering all manner of indignities meted out by the vicious head of staff (Sheila Keith) and her equally depraved second-in-command (Dorothy Gordon).Cleverly written and cheaply produced in response to the right-wing Christian protests which had been making headlines in the UK at the time on the back of several recent controversial film releases - notably "A Clockwork Orange", "Straw Dogs", "The Devils" (all 1971) and "Last Tango in Paris" (Ultimo Tango a Parigi, 1972) - "Whipcord" opens with a now-famous dedication "...to those who are disturbed by today's lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment...." Though contemporary critics railed against the threadbare production values and softcore nudity, it's apparent that much of their outrage was prompted by Walker's brazen challenge to the Christian moralists, whose over-zealous rhetoric has always enjoyed a disproportionate measure of representation in the British media. The film is deliberately crude and confrontational, with a vulnerable heroine - played as an infuriating wimp by relative newcomer Irving, sporting one of the worst French accents in movie history ("'Ow did zey bring you 'ere?") - struggling to survive against all the odds, while Markham's latent insanity threatens to expose her hideous regime to the outside world, allowing her staff to indulge their most puritan impulses. Keith is especially good in this regard ("I'm going to make you ashamed of your body, de Vernay. I'm going to see to that...personally!"), manifesting the corrupt zeal of a True Believer with little room for pity or compassion. The plot is fairly busy and the sleaze quotient is high for a British shocker of this vintage, but neither McGillivray's script nor Walker's laidback direction comes even close to matching the debauched atrocities which thoroughly distinguished the 'prison camp' subgenre that proliferated throughout the 1970's and early 80s, exemplified by the likes of "Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS" (1974) in America, "Barbed Wire Dolls" (Frauengefaengnis, 1975) in mainland Europe, and "Bamboo House of Dolls" (Nu Ji Zhong Ying, 1973), "Lost Souls" (Ckui Sau, 1980) and "War Victims" (Kamp Tawanan Wanita, 1983) in Asia. Still, "House of Whipcord" is an effectively low-key relic, and it led directly to Walker's next offering, "Frightmare" (1974), reuniting him with McGillivray and Keith for one of their best collaborations to date. Image's DVD is presented in the original full-frame format and runs 102m 1s (not including the logo for long-defunct UK distributor Derann Video which appears at the beginning and end). The print is more than a little ragged in places, and the Eastmancolor process has faded badly, meaning that huge swathes of this gloomy film - which takes place for the most part in dimly-lit locations in the dead of night - unfolds in near-total darkness, making it virtually impossible at times to see what's going on. That's the fault of the original phtography, not the transfer, which is a little grainy but otherwise OK. There's no trailer, no extras, and no captions or subtitles - par for the course in Image's 'EuroShock' collection. Sound format is 1.0 mono, and the disc isn't regionally coded
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Movie, Bad DVD Transfer, September 5, 2003
"The House of Whipcord" falls neatly into that particularly loathsome category of films lovingly referred to by fans of the cinematic macabre as "Women-in-Prison," or WIP, movies. Nearly every entry in this bizarre sub genre emerged in the 1970s, a decade known for its wacky, experimental odysseys into the darker aspects of human nature. Arguably the best known film falling within the bounds of WIP films is "Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS," a movie that spawned several depraved sequels. "The House of Whipcord" is a kinder, gentler contribution to this field from British director Pete Walker, a man who made several other sleazy pictures both preceding and following this one. "Women-in-Prison" films died out by the 1980s, but now new generations of sleaze lovers can watch these movies thanks to the current DVD revolution."The House of Whipcord" takes place in England during the early 1970s, an England awash in a sea of immorality left over from the swinging 1960s. Certain elements of the population take umbrage at such despicable occurrences as a young French woman prancing nude in a public park for the sake of picture spread in a magazine, so an old English judge named Bailey and a trio of middle aged women set up a private court and prison in an abandoned children's school with the intention of abducting those females guilty of public indecency. Tired of seeing "effete" courts letting young ladies off with a slap on the wrist, these stodgy conservatives take the ideas of punishment seriously: penalties at the jail include long stretches of solitary confinement, floggings, and even death by hanging for those deemed incorrigible. The legal opinions of the judge and his accomplices make Joseph Stalin and Hammurabi look like benevolent lawgivers. The focus of the film is Anne Marie, a nineteen year old French model caught up in a situation way beyond her control. At a party publicizing her nude romp in the park, she meets the darkly handsome Mark E. Desade (that's right, this is really his name). Mark intrigues Anne Marie with his brooding presence and the fact that he likes to do disturbing things with ice cubes. Mark offers to take Anne Marie to see his parents out in the country, an offer the young French girl readily takes up. Unfortunately for Anne Marie, Mark's mother is the hideously unbalanced Mrs. Wakehurst, Justice Bailey's aide de camp at the converted prison. Bailey quickly passes sentence on Anne Marie for her degenerate crime: she must stay in the jail until she proves worthy of release. Regrettably for Anne Marie, Bailey suffers from senility and must rely on Wakehurst and her two uniformed jailers to run the prison, and these three ladies do not intend to offer any hope of redemption to Anne Marie or any of the other inmates. Wakehurst and her cronies start committing extralegal punishments on the female prisoners (as if the whole the thing isn't extralegal, but Bailey originally set up the rules and what his co-workers are doing wasn't in the original plan). A subplot involves a friend of Anne Marie, named Julia, doing her best to discover the whereabouts of her French friend. Everything comes to a head in the dramatic conclusion, as the sunlight finally shines on the sinister machinations at Bailey's prison of horrors. Fans who pick this one up looking for lots of shocks and gore will definitely find themselves disappointed. With the exception of a hanging, an off camera stabbing, and a few prudish floggings, "House of Whipcord" does not deliver in the grue department. What this movie does accomplish is a squalid, oppressive atmosphere of forbidding doom. The prison where Anne Marie pays a price for her actions looks like the type of resort spa Count Dracula would vacation in during the summer months. The interior shots are poorly lit, almost claustrophobic in their implications, and this fits the theme of the film perfectly. I especially enjoyed the performances of the three ladies who played Wakehurst and the prison guards. Their characters reveled in the sadism of the entire exercise, and as ridiculous as the overall premise of a secret prison right out in the open is, they made the whole thing at least slightly believable. Considering that Walker constructed a film almost entirely free of bloody carnage, the pacing was excellent: "House of Whipcord" moved along quite nicely, and I never felt bored while watching it. A few notes on the DVD: the picture transfer is terrible. The people who transferred the film to DVD did a lousy job (I don't think they even attempted a restoration; this looks like a VCD), and there are no extras whatsoever. Is this really an Image Entertainment disc? I don't know, but whoever released this film fell down on the job. "House of Whipcord" really needed a nice touch up, as most of the scenes take place at night or in dungeon conditions with little light. At least two of the female leads, the actress who played Anne Marie and the actress who played Julia, are very foxy 70's gals. Getting an opportunity to see these two nice looking ladies in various situations is a pleasure. "House of Whipcord" isn't a spectacular movie, but it is entertaining and well worth watching.
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