House of Whipcord 2006 Horror Movie Review

With a title like House of Whipcord, you already know this is no Disney movie. British exploitation horror-meister Pete Walker (The Flesh and Blood Show) combines his two shock-in-trade specialties—sex and violence—for this sadistic portrait of a private prison used for the systematic degradation of “loose” women. A perverted prison matron, her dutiful son (named, tellingly, Mark E. DeSade), and a doddering old judge with an Old Testament approach to modern permissiveness collect beautiful young women guilty of the most minor offenses (our heroine is found guilty of public lewdness) and punish them for their sins via a penance that ends in their inevitable death. As our sweet young French model is stripped, whipped, and generally abused by her brutal captors—oddly enough merciless and angry middle-aged women—her roommate takes it upon herself to track her down. It’s a sleazy exercise in cinematic sadism perpetrated on beautiful women for the entertainment of the audience, smoothed slightly by surprisingly good performances, a modicum of rough style, a few gripping scenes of tension, and one jaw-dropping twist. —Sean Axmaker