Gruesome Galleries: Pete Walker’s 1975 Masterpiece HOUSE OF WHIPCORD

SHOCK beats some lurid images from British exploitation classic HOUSE OF WHIPCORD into your brain.

With work falling somewhere between the elegance of Hammer horror and the lurid down-market thrills of Norman J. Warren, UK exploitation overlord Pete Walker is one of the genuine masters of British horror.

Although often dismissed as a leering hack obsessed with all things cruel and carnal (indeed his roots were firmly ensconced in strip club stand-up and pornography), Walker’s horror films were anything but bad.

Though low budget, extremely violent and sexual, his work bypassed the popular wave English supernatural terror of the time for very real, resonant and disturbing examinations of internal torment and psychological horror.

With films like the titillating 3D shocker THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW, the intense and unnerving SCHIZO and his masterpiece of cannibal family matters FRIGHTMARE (sort of the Brit answer to THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE), Walker established himself as a box office winner…and a critical Antichrist.

One of Walker’s most beloved and notorious pictures is also, arguably, his greatest achievement, a film that treads the fine line of good taste and, like many of Walker’s best films, employ what is perhaps Walker’s most devastating cinematic weapon: the matronly mistress of the UK macabre, Sheila Keith.

That film is 1975’s HOUSE OF WHIPCORD (released in the UK in 1974), a sleazy but sophisticated and wildly subversive film and the single weirdest entry in the generally spotty women-in-prison sub-genre.

In it, an absolutely unhinged family kidnap young models off the streets of London and imprison them in a sort of underground, freestyle jail where torture and pain reign supreme.

WHIPCORD is one of the greatest examples of the genius of Walker being unleashed at the wrong time and the wrong place. When the film was released, it was sold and marketed as exploitation, but, even considering the lurid subject matter, it’s far above its babes-behind-bars peers. This is a dark, nasty and depressing melodrama in which Walker uses the trappings of exploitation to launch a personal attack against the British legal system (much like he did in FRIGHTMARE).

The performances, including Barbara Markham as the Bloody Mama and Patrick Barr as the doddering, easily duped blind judge are great but, not surprisingly, Keith owns the film, playing a super sadistic, whip-wielding warder who truly gets into her wicked work.

Long live Peter Walker and may the HOUSE OF WHIPCORD forever offend!