THE HOUSE ON STRAW HILL

WARNING!!! Major plot spoilers ahead!!!


Udo Kier The House on Straw Hill

By 1975, the British horror film was on it's last legs. Hammer, once the pinnacle of the British genre community, was dissolving into a mess of shoddy slop, Pete Walker was beginning to tire and the genre as a whole was being left behind, commercially and thematically, by both the American and European markets. For horror fans in the UK, it must have felt like a particularly awful drought. Looking at the releases from 1975, only 5 British horror films stick out: Pete's Walker's HOUSE OF MORTAL SIN, THE LIFETAKER, I DON'T WANT TO BE BORN, SEX EXPRESS and this film from director James Clarke, THE HOUSE ON STRAW HILL - or, as it's known in the UK, EXPOSE'.


Linda Hayden The House on Straw Hill

THE HOUSE ON STRAW HILL stars German actor and genre vet Udo Kier as Paul Martin, a reclusive author hard at work on his second novel. Besides being wracked by panic attacks - which are accompanied by bizarre hallucinations of slit wrists, screaming faces and big, sharp knives - he is also suffering from a major case of writer's block. After bidding farewell to his lover Suzanne, played by British sex flick regular Fiona Richmond, Paul has his agent send him a typist so that he may dictate the novel, something he believes will help him immensely. The agent sends a young woman named Linda to stay with Paul and his housekeeper in Paul's in-the-middle-of-nowhere home for a few weeks. Immediately upon her arrival, it is obvious Paul fancies her - even more apparent after he beats up two thugs harassing her in a store parking lot.


Paul and Linda's relationship is mostly professional but his attraction to her begins growing stronger. Neither one of these individuals is particularly interesting and both seem to have their own problems. And by problems I mean MENTAL problems. Paul, for instance, is a paranoid egotist who wears surgical gloves during sex. As for Linda... Well, it becomes pretty clear that all is not well when she is attacked and raped by the two men from the store parking lot in the middle of a field, only to turn the tables on them, shoot them both with their own shotgun and wander happily back to the house. Soon enough, Linda is playing seductive games with Paul, masturbating pretty much non-stop to a picture of her dead husband, and murdering the housekeeper for snooping around. When Linda turns down Paul's advances, Paul calls Suzanne to come for a visit. Linda wastes no time in seducing Suzanne before slicing her to ribbons in the bathroom. Turns out, in the film's not-too-hard-to-figure-out twist ending that Linda's dead husband knew Paul rather well and that Paul stole her husband's book, slapped his own name on it and sold it for a half million dollars. Depressed and betrayed, her husband killed himself and now Linda is out for revenge.


Udo Kier The House on Straw Hill

Sounds wonderfully sordid and sleazy, doesn't it? Well, it is. But it's carried out the wrong way. So many things are wrong about this film that to list them all would take a few hours. I'll focus instead on what I think are the main reasons this film fails.


First, the casting. It may sound superficial and a bit sexist to say this but when you're making a sexually charged thriller, it helps to hire people who are themselves sexually attractive. Udo Kier was, at the time this film was made, a German heartthrob of sorts. He's a good looking guy with piercing eyes and a kind of anti-charisma that makes watching him act so much fun. Even when he's not going full-out over-the-top, Kier is always entertaining. There's a reason he has such a remarkable fanbase within the genre community. He has an effortless charm. So kudos to Clarke for hiring a decent male lead. I wish the same could be said about the two female leads, Linda Hayden and Fiona Richmond.


Linda Hayden The House on Straw Hill

It was hard to believe that the Linda Hayden in this film was the same Linda Hayden from BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW, MADHOUSE and TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA. Not only does she look substantially older but she also looks downright unappealing. She is attractive in the same way a fourth grade teacher might be attractive, pretty but plain and not exactly sexbomb material. She looks downright uncomfortable in this film and her obvious hesitation to dive in and get messy kills any potential eroticism her frequent nude scenes would have had. Richmond's popularity is confusing to me and not only because she looks like a post-op drag queen, bad tit job and all. She looks terrible. I know beauty is subjective and one man's "yuck" is another man's "yay" but Richmond is one of the most unattractive women I've ever seen fuck her way through a movie. So when Hayden and Richmond settle in to perform the most non-erotic lesbian love scene ever committed to celluloid, I found myself fighting the urge to reach for the remote.


Now I know that sounds bad but it's true. In order for a film to work on an erotic level, the actors must be appealing to the viewer. So THE HOUSE ON STRAW HILL failed in that respect for me for two reasons: one, both actresses were unappealing and two, neither one looked comfortable and natural. As a result, their frequent nude and sex scenes failed to raise my, ahem, blood pressure.


Fiona Richmond The House on Straw Hill

But that isn't THE HOUSE ON STRAW HILL's biggest failure. It's big failure is in it's inability to tell a convincing, interesting story. This film has no real sense of internal logic. Subplots form and then are dropped for no reason. Character motivations shift at a moment's notice. There is no real sense of narrative build-up. Major plot points just spring up out of nowhere. The mystery angle is introduced and carried on through the entire running time even though the screenwriter and director basically spill the beans a quarter of the way through. Nothing fits together right and nothing gels. This film is a tangle of plot points and half-realized scenes, played out in a typical, dry British style with no sense of momentum or intrigue. It's D.O.A. from the get-go but it slogs on, like some kinda limey undead bastard of an exploitation film trying desperately to find some brains.


Not recommended.