Dedicated to those “who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment,” House of Whipcord demonstrates why a woman never should agree to embark on a weekend getaway with a man she has known for less than a week: Girl, you’re so going to get hurt — and I don’t mean just your heart.
This lesson is learned by Ann-Marie (Penny Irving, Old Dracula), a 19-year-old French model smart enough to know who the Marquis de Sade was, yet dumb enough not to run far, far away when a man named Mark E. Desade (Robert Tayman, Vampire Circus) talks her up at a party. After one real date, he wants her to accompany him on a trip to see his parents. We call that a “red flag,” luv.
Immediately upon arrival at the isolated countryside estate, Ann-Marie is stripped (of both clothes and possessions), bathed and “checked for vermin” by the manly matrons in charge of the place, which actually is an illegal correctional house for crimes against the moral code. Ann-Marie’s offense? Appearing nude in public as part of an advertisement. Punishments doled out by the loyal Whipcord staff include 40-lash floggings, rat-infested accommodations, uneven haircuts and, if you’re lucky, a good noose ’round the neck.
From Pete Walker (House of the Long Shadows), Great Britain’s brand-name practitioner of pulse-quickening, the film occupies a strange place of its own, somewhere between the Naziploitation subgenre and the women-in-prison picture, being too buttoned-up to belong to either. Heavier on suspense than scares, Walker seems more interested in the ladies’ attempts at escape than in depicting more salacious sequences. While the somewhat restrained (but still shocking) approach widens the film’s appeal and, yes, depth, it cannot stave off the Act 3 blues. Like its blind, old man with a cane (Patrick Barr, The Satanic Rites of Dracula), House of Whipcord plods slowly toward an inevitable conclusion once Walker strategically has set up all his chess pieces. Finally, he catches up to the viewer. —Rod Lott