"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 childrens 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 (thats 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, Marks mother is the hideously unbalanced Mrs. Wakehurst, Justice Baileys 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 isnt extralegal, but Bailey originally set up the rules and what his co-workers are doing wasnt 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 Baileys 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 dont 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 dont 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 70s gals. Getting an opportunity to see these two nice looking ladies in various situations is a pleasure. "House of Whipcord" isnt a spectacular movie, but it is entertaining and well worth watching.

A girl who has been beaten and whipped is rescued by a trucker in the pouring rain. In a flashback, we learn that the girl is Anne Marie, a French model who was recently fined 10 pounds for exposing herself during a photo shoot for a fashion magazine. She befriends Mark E. DeSade, a writer, who asks her to his parents place over the weekend.

What happens afterwards is Anne Maries worst nightmare. Two sadistic looking elderly woman in dark blue uniforms order her to undress, put on a beige shift/dress, and take her before an elderly, blind, and senile Judge Desmond Bailey. There, she learns where she has been brought to. "This court exists outside the statutory laws of this land. It is a private court. We are constituted by a private charter. ... we pass what we regard as proper sentence on depraved females of every category on whom the effete misguided courts of Great Britain have been too lenient." A ten pound fine wont cut it for Bailey and the forbidding governess.

Remember Bill Clintons "three strikes and youre out"? How about "three strikes and youre dead"? The first time, its solitary confinement with rats for buddies, the second time, its flogging, and the third time, its the hangmans noose, as is the case for inmate Karen Vaughan.

Meanwhile, Julia King, an employee at the fashion magazine and roommate, gets worried that Anne Marie hasnt contacted her for nine days. Her boyfriend Tony thinks Anne Marie is busy making whoopee with her man and tells her not to worry.

Are You Being Served? fans will be aghast at seeing Penny Irving (Anne Marie) being subjected to all sorts of nastiness. Of Young Mr. Graces secretaries in AYBS?, Penny played Ms. Bakewell, she of the long flowing red hair. Well, this is her debut film, made three or so years before she made it big with AYBS?, and she does well with a French accent and is still the dreamgirl to look at.

Other Walker alumni: Patrick Barr came out in The Flesh And Blood Show as Major Bell. Sheila Keith (prison officer Walker) was Dorothy Yates in Frightmare. Ray Brooks (Tony) was also in The F&B Show and Tiffany Jones.

Compared to the five other Pete Walker films Ive seen, this is one of the better ones. It doesnt beat The Flesh And Blood Show or the light-hearted softcore comedy romp The Tales Of Tiffany Jones, but outdoes the grim Frightmare, the tepid Die Screaming Marianne and jumbled The Three Dimensions of Greta. But Barrs Old Testament quote at the end of the movie addresses the importance of administering justice fairly: "If there be a controversy between men and it comes to be that judges may judge them, then shall justify the righteous and condemn the wicked. And shall it be the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down and to be beaten before his face according to his fault, by a certain number. Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed, lest if he should exceed and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother shall seem vile unto thee."

So, what we got here is one scene with a previously-whipped back of a pretty blonde being admired by the sadistic guard, and then a full back nude scene of the blonde as she tries to escape. Two brief bottom shots, thats it. Theyre pretty good though, very realistic whip damage, one of the best ever.

Theres some other minor nudity (the undressing scene at the start of course), and I might give it one more star if it wasnt for the absolutely gutless cop out of showing zero actual whipping scenes in a movie titled like this. Shameful.

I suppose it has to be in the collection for the cell scene mentioned above.

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 todays 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, its apparent that much of their outrage was prompted by Walkers 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 Markhams 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 ("Im going to make you ashamed of your body, de Vernay. Im 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 McGillivrays script nor Walkers laidback direction comes even close to matching the debauched atrocities which thoroughly distinguished the prison camp subgenre that proliferated throughout the 1970s 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 Walkers next offering, "Frightmare" (1974), reuniting him with McGillivray and Keith for one of their best collaborations to date.

Images 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 whats going on. Thats the fault of the original phtography, not the transfer, which is a little grainy but otherwise OK. Theres no trailer, no extras, and no captions or subtitles - par for the course in Images EuroShock collection. Sound format is 1.0 mono, and the disc isnt regionally coded

Despite the lurid title and some extraneous nudity, this film benefits from excellent acting all round, especially by Sheila Keith and Barbara Markham, and has an edge lacking in its Hammer contemporaries. If one can ignore the exploitation element to this film (and these days it seems fairly tame anyway) this is a surprisingly good movie - of its type.