Rant #1,998: Saturday Afternoon at the Movies

This past weekend will not go down as among the best I have experienced in my life.

Both my wife and I were, and still are, under the weather, so although we pushed ourselves to do what we needed to do, we really were pretty much out of it on Saturday and Sunday.

In fact, my wife--who got hit much harder than I did with this illness, which appears to be of the upper respiratory fashion--took Monday off, because she simply wasn't doing too well. She has a doctor's appointment later today, so I am sure that everything will be all right.

Anyway, with the AL Divisional Series between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians having a day off on Saturday, I really had nothing to watch on TV, or watch on TV that wouldn't fry my already fried brain and body, so I went to YouTube to find something really trashy to watch.

And I found it in an early 1970s British picture called "House of Whipcord."

The 1974 film, directed by Pete Walker and starring a bevy of forgettable actors, is about a couple of "Swingin' London" singles who are into the mod scene of the time, which means lots of smoking and alcohol, wild clothes, and some of the best looking women on the planet. The guys are pretty much all ugly, and you wonder how they hooked up with these babes, but being in the situation I was in, I wasn't thinking too much about this situation, which I have seen in one film after the other that came out of England during this period.

Anyway, this group includes some models; one, in particular, is very blond and very French, but is doing her modeling in England. Anne-Marie (Penny Irving, who actually became a very popular TV star in England around this time) appears in a topless shot, and is so embarrassed, that she can't look at herself.

At the party, she meets this mysterious looking guy who has the long hair, sideburns and chains around his neck and rings around his fingers that I guess were requisite during this time period, and his name is Mark, Mark E. De Sade (I kid you not).

The blond and Mark get cozy, and they meet up again, with Mark eventually saying he would like to spend a weekend with the model at his place, and have her meet his mother, and she jumps at the chance to do something different for once, even though her equally gorgeous roommate has some suspicions, including that no one knew who this guy was and why he was at the party.

So the blond goes with Mark to his home, which is actually an old jail out in the country somewhere. He acts very coldly to the girl, and even she has some suspicions (she is not the brightest person, but she has great hair), but she goes along with it.

The next thing you know, the prison is actually the site of an off-the-legal-tracks tribunal, where the woman who runs the jail with her two cronies and blind-and-getting-deafer-by-the-minute husband puts young things on trial for doing things that they feel are indecent, such as posing nude, as the young model did.

She is immediately thrown in jail with about six or seven other women who did other "heinous" things, and eventually, one way or the other, the girls are hanged for their indiscretions.

What happens in the remainder of the film is that the girls try to escape, they are found, and most of them die by hanging.

But we find out plenty in the interim, including that sort of a "Psycho" relationship takes place between the head of the jail and Mark, her son, who basically is the rouse to get to each of the girls, entice them with his supposed good looks and nice voice, and get them into the jail.

There is one scene where the mother walks around with a switchblade in her hand which is so Hitchcockian that it pretty much puts over the whole film in and of itself.

I am not going to tell you what happens in the finale of the movie, but it is worth watching the film to find out.

Yes, there is the requisite mild nudity, some lesbian tendencies from one jailer in particular, some blood, and some really cheesy dialogue, but if you are into films that are so bad they are good, well, here is one of the better ones of that genre.

It was also an interesting way to kill nearly two hours during an afternoon where I felt like garbage, but how happy I was that what I was watching wasn't pure garbage; high-grade garbage perhaps, but it kept me very interested the entire time.

You can find this movie at the following link: https://youtu.be/4YQMf1mNOl0