Seemingly made with whatever loose change was found on the streets where it was shot, Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher is a real trial by ire. Remember, you can’t spell “Ray Dennis” without “ADR,” because the entire movie is dubbed — the least of its troubles — and as if embarrassed of its inherent shoddiness, he directed under the nom de plume of Wolfgang Schmidt. Rhymes with what he made.

The title serves as a near-encapsulation of what little happens within its 72 interminable minutes. The Hollywood Strangler (Pierre Agostino, Steckler’s Las Vegas Serial Killer) spends his days answering sex ads in sex newspapers so he can photograph weather-beaten women in shorts so short, one practically can see the STDs. After clicking off a few shots, he strangles them to death.

Meanwhile, the Skid Row Slasher (Carolyn Brandt, Steckler’s Rat Pfink a Boo Boo) works in a pitiful used bookstore where the occasional — which is to say “daily” — wino stumbles in clutching a bottle of hooch and bothers her scant few customers. After following the drunks outside, she slashes them to death.

Eventually, after a little stalking, the two killers face off in a fatal duel. Who wins? Not the viewer, that’s for damn sure. —Rod Lott

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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

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