Pete Walker - Britmovie

DB7 · 11-03-2005, 10:08 AM

'God, what a terrible film'

Pete Walker gave British cinema cannibal housewives, homicidal priests and teen pimps - and what did it give him in return? Piles. He reveals all to Will Hodgkinson

Friday March 11, 2005
The Guardian

Pete Walker ... 'All I wanted to do was create a bit of mischief'. Photo: Martin Godwin

Pete Walker doesn't look like a corrupter of youth. The former film director, who tormented both critics and the moral majority in the late 1960s and 70s with a series of self-financed sex and horror movies, is currently preoccupied with the fact that his rather foolish dog has scampered off somewhere in a panic, quite possibly as a reaction to having his home invaded by a journalist from a liberal newspaper. "If you were from the Daily Mail, this would never have happened!" shouts Walker in a panic, as his wife conducts an emergency search for their confused pet. "Our dog is clearly a Tory. He must have heard the Guardian was coming."
Thankfully, the dog returns and calm is restored. In 1982 Walker gave up making B-movies - whose titles included House of Whipcord and Frightmare - for the more lucrative business of buying and restoring cinemas. Now he is a model of respectability, with a house in a smart Surrey cul-de-sac large enough to indulge his passion for Victorian slot machines. He doesn't miss the old life. "Every time I made a picture, I'd get piles," he says. "I haven't suffered from those kind of ailments since 1982."

Walker made his name with films that hooked in audiences with sex and violence before testing their limits by turning pillars of the establishment into objects of fear and ridicule. In 1974's House of Whipcord, a judge and a disgraced prison warden subject beautiful young women to imprisonment, torture and even execution for what they imagine are their loose morals. In 1976's The Confessional, a sin-obsessed priest turns the sacraments into weapons of murder. "I was really hoping to get into trouble on that one," sighs Walker. "I mean, he kills people with a communion wafer, which is meant to be the body of Christ in Catholicism. I made that film because I went to a Catholic school where hellfire and damnation were rammed down my throat. I was waiting for a blasphemy charge from the Vatican. But it never came."

Walker came from what he calls the "kick, bollock and scramble" school of film-making, where there's not much concern for such high-minded concepts as quality and taste. Born in 1939 to a chorus girl and a music-hall comedian, he learned his craft making TV commercials in the mid-60s before seeing a window of opportunity. Walker gambled on making independent films on a very low budget. Guessing that there were enough young people out there who would pay to satisfy their naive curiosity about the opposite sex, he borrowed some money from the Pall Mall branch of Lloyds bank and shot his first feature, I Like Birds, over eight days in 1968. It turned a profit and he kept going in a similar vein for the next 15 years.

"I was the uninvited guest to the British film industry. Nobody wanted to know me," says Walker, in a tone that suggests a certain amount of pride. "I knew I wanted to make films, but I would see these serious-looking guys going around with scripts under their arm, spending three or four years trying to get their films made. I couldn't be like that - I had to make a living and I wanted to get behind a camera and shout "action". So I would go out and shoot something like School for Sex - God, that was a terrible film - and a few weeks later every cinema in the country would be showing it."

The first film to make an impact was 1969's Cool It Carol, in which a teenage couple leave their Midlands village to gatecrash the twilight days of swinging London. Before long the boy has pimped out his girlfriend, but rather than drag the couple down into a decline as a punishment for their permissiveness Walker sends them back to rural safety and happy domesticity, turning the whole saga into a jolly romp. It was the first sign of the mischievousness that was to colour his later films, and it infuriated critics at the time.

"Cool It Carol was based on a true story I had read in the News of the World," he explains. "But I gave it a happy ending, which annoyed everyone because apparently I was encouraging people to be promiscuous. I just saw it as pragmatic. Strangely enough, Cool It Carol did get quite good reviews and some critics even called it a serious piece of film-making. I think that's going too far, but it was certainly cynical: Swinging London was coming to an end and the film was showing that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be."

In the early 1970s, Walker moved into horror. Then he discovered his ace in the hole: a sweet old Scottish jobbing actress called Sheila Keith who had an uncanny ability for playing depraved maniacs. Their working partnership began in 1974 with Frightmare. Keith takes the role of Dorothy Yates, a middle-class, tweed-clad, Home Counties mother of two whose thatched cottage holds a dark secret: her insatiable appetite for human flesh. In House of Whipcord, she plays a sadistic prison warden whose repressed lesbianism has driven her to torture beautiful young women for kicks. In The Confessional she steals the show as a one-eyed housekeeper and partner in crime to the film's murderous priest.

"Sheila Keith was a lady who lived a quiet life with her dogs and her cats and came into work to do, brilliantly, whatever was asked of her," says Walker. "She was like your nice old aunt who would serve you cucumber sandwiches before ripping into a dismembered limb - without complaining."

Keith specialised in depraved characters who committed acts of extreme brutality while sermonising on the virtues of a good and moral life. She came to symbolise the running theme through all of Walker's films: the abuse of authority. "At any given time at my school, 50% of the masters had their hands down boys' trousers," he claims. "Prison wardens must have an in-built sadism, otherwise why would they do that job? Judges do a holier-than-thou act every day. How dare these people pontificate to the rest of us? They're getting off on it!"

Walker then launches into a tirade against Tony Blair, Catholic priests, Mary Whitehouse and pretty much every authority figure who has ever lived. Once he calms down, I point out that House of Whipcord begins with a dedication "to those who are disturbed by today's lax moral attitudes, and eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment", which rather goes against his libertine philosophy. "I worked with a great writer called Freddie Shaughnessy," says Walker, reclining into an anecdotal position in his armchair. "He was an Eton-educated pillar of the establishment - the Queen's first boyfriend, actually - and he gave me some very good advice: never let them know which side you are on."

Nobody could accuse Walker of toeing the party line. The evil authority figures in his films usually get away with it, and the heroes and heroines almost always die. Walker stopped making films when, aged 41, he felt the cries of outrage begin to wane. He only became aware of the cult surrounding the films two years ago, after being invited to give a Q&A in front of 500 students and being asked about the subliminal themes of Frightmare and Cool It Carol. Did his films have hidden depths? "Of course they didn't. But recently I had to record commentary for the DVD releases, so I saw the films for the first time since making them, and you know what? They're not as bad as I thought. But searching for hidden meaning ... they were just films. All I wanted to do was create a bit of mischief."

· The Pete Walker DVD Collection (Anchor Bay Entertainment) is released on March 21.

giallihaydw · 15-04-2005, 03:57 PM

Long live Walker!!
Watched my new Anchor Bay DVD of FRIGHTMARE last night.It's still great,and despite the odd scratch looks as nice as it ever will!
Sheila Keith RIP.

plasticmaggot · 27-06-2007, 06:32 PM

hi there. Anybody got any info on mr Pete Walker, he of schizo, house of mortal sin etc..
also, i'm trying to track down some of his early films, but alas, as yet no luck.

Hanseat · 27-06-2007, 07:31 PM

One of the places to start (includes short bio):

DVD Times - The Pete Walker Collection

Hanseat

MarcMorris · 27-06-2007, 09:20 PM

I may be able to help - I worked on the Anchor Bay box set and produced the extras and audio commentaries. I'm still in touch with Walker too.

scenesixty · 11-11-2007, 08:39 PM

I met Ms. Sheila Keith after a West End Saturday afternoon play 'Lettice and Lovage' (1990).
I specifically wanted to meet her, so with a friend we knocked on the dressing room door. She was very gracious and pleasant, along with her wig mistress, she happily posed for a couple of photographs (I still have them) even by 1990, Sheila had became a bit of a celebrity! In 'Dr Terribles House Of Horrors' she reprised her 'Frightmare' role by reading Tarot cards (as Grandma Lee) in ''And now The Fearing Starts'
a supremely gifted actress!

D Cairns · 12-11-2007, 11:35 AM

Walker is fascinating but I find the actual experience of watching his films totally unrewarding! I guess there's something interesting about how joyless and bleak and miserable they are. And HOUSE OF WHIPCORD should be commended for successfully avoiding any sado-erotic thrills whatsoever, meaning that it cheats the people who pay to see it and offends those who don't!

davidb · 06-04-2008, 01:23 PM

i get the impression of watching pete walkers films that all they were ever meant to be were exploitation movies ,it just being a complete fluke that the odd one like cool it carol turned into a b movie masterpiece

Amethyst_Isle · 06-04-2008, 02:00 PM

Some of Pete Walker's films are pretty good when you can see how London was and other places too,which is a good thing imo as a lot of locations have Erm slightly changed from the 70's.

Shadwell · 06-04-2008, 06:22 PM

Shelia Keith was superb in "Firghtmare." heh heh. You certainly would want to mess with her. I like Pete Walker's films. Explotation? Bring it on....

davidb · 30-05-2008, 02:09 AM

im currently watching the pete walker box set of horror films and theres one thing thats a common thread amongst pretty much all his films . they all feature an aston martin sports car ! [ sorry non car lovers but us petrolheads notice these things ] were they petes own cars at the time of production of the film ? theres a book out about him called making mischief ,perhaps the answer will be in that

m35541 · 30-05-2008, 07:52 AM

Walker's horror films are often shoddy and poorly acted but viewed as a whole they are at least a different take on things that the likes of what Amicus, Tigon and Hammer were doing and an attempt to relocate British horror firmly back into contemporary 1970's society. I think Frightmare is by far and away his best film and a genuinely nasty and effective English equivalent to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

davidb · 30-05-2008, 11:54 AM

i watched house of whipcord for the first time the other night . crikey how did he get away with it in the strict censorship 70s ? [ mary whitehouse would have had a heart attack ] for a film which is half of it just an excuse to put some t&a on screen ,it really had some atmosphere and makes you think about the subject of corporal and capital punishment .quite an achievment for an exploitation movie .

m35541 · 30-05-2008, 01:11 PM

House of Whipcord is pretty mild content wise for a 1974 film (we'd already had The Devils, Straw Dogs and The Exorcist by the time this came out).

Mr Flash · 30-05-2008, 08:27 PM

A few scans of the American press book for House of Whipcord, A.I.P. really knew how to sell a film!!!!

http://img194.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06435_housewhiled-Scanned-000_123_242lo.jpg

http://img111.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06443_housewhiled-Scanned-01_123_665lo.jpg

http://img31.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06450_housewhiled-Scanned-02_123_1192lo.jpg

http://img103.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06457_housewhiled-Scanned-03_123_1171lo.jpg

http://img200.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06462_housewhiled-Scanned-04_123_243lo.jpg

http://img7.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06620_housewhiled-Scanned-05_123_899lo.jpg

11-03-2005, 10:08 AM	#1
DB7 is just a prescription talkin' Administrator Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Shrops Posts: 6,088 My Mood: Country: iTrader: (10)	Pete Walker 'God, what a terrible film' Pete Walker gave British cinema cannibal housewives, homicidal priests and teen pimps - and what did it give him in return? Piles. He reveals all to Will Hodgkinson Friday March 11, 2005 The Guardian Pete Walker ... 'All I wanted to do was create a bit of mischief'. Photo: Martin Godwin Pete Walker doesn't look like a corrupter of youth. The former film director, who tormented both critics and the moral majority in the late 1960s and 70s with a series of self-financed sex and horror movies, is currently preoccupied with the fact that his rather foolish dog has scampered off somewhere in a panic, quite possibly as a reaction to having his home invaded by a journalist from a liberal newspaper. "If you were from the Daily Mail, this would never have happened!" shouts Walker in a panic, as his wife conducts an emergency search for their confused pet. "Our dog is clearly a Tory. He must have heard the Guardian was coming." Thankfully, the dog returns and calm is restored. In 1982 Walker gave up making B-movies - whose titles included House of Whipcord and Frightmare - for the more lucrative business of buying and restoring cinemas. Now he is a model of respectability, with a house in a smart Surrey cul-de-sac large enough to indulge his passion for Victorian slot machines. He doesn't miss the old life. "Every time I made a picture, I'd get piles," he says. "I haven't suffered from those kind of ailments since 1982." Walker made his name with films that hooked in audiences with sex and violence before testing their limits by turning pillars of the establishment into objects of fear and ridicule. In 1974's House of Whipcord, a judge and a disgraced prison warden subject beautiful young women to imprisonment, torture and even execution for what they imagine are their loose morals. In 1976's The Confessional, a sin-obsessed priest turns the sacraments into weapons of murder. "I was really hoping to get into trouble on that one," sighs Walker. "I mean, he kills people with a communion wafer, which is meant to be the body of Christ in Catholicism. I made that film because I went to a Catholic school where hellfire and damnation were rammed down my throat. I was waiting for a blasphemy charge from the Vatican. But it never came." Walker came from what he calls the "kick, bollock and scramble" school of film-making, where there's not much concern for such high-minded concepts as quality and taste. Born in 1939 to a chorus girl and a music-hall comedian, he learned his craft making TV commercials in the mid-60s before seeing a window of opportunity. Walker gambled on making independent films on a very low budget. Guessing that there were enough young people out there who would pay to satisfy their naive curiosity about the opposite sex, he borrowed some money from the Pall Mall branch of Lloyds bank and shot his first feature, I Like Birds, over eight days in 1968. It turned a profit and he kept going in a similar vein for the next 15 years. "I was the uninvited guest to the British film industry. Nobody wanted to know me," says Walker, in a tone that suggests a certain amount of pride. "I knew I wanted to make films, but I would see these serious-looking guys going around with scripts under their arm, spending three or four years trying to get their films made. I couldn't be like that - I had to make a living and I wanted to get behind a camera and shout "action". So I would go out and shoot something like School for Sex - God, that was a terrible film - and a few weeks later every cinema in the country would be showing it." The first film to make an impact was 1969's Cool It Carol, in which a teenage couple leave their Midlands village to gatecrash the twilight days of swinging London. Before long the boy has pimped out his girlfriend, but rather than drag the couple down into a decline as a punishment for their permissiveness Walker sends them back to rural safety and happy domesticity, turning the whole saga into a jolly romp. It was the first sign of the mischievousness that was to colour his later films, and it infuriated critics at the time. "Cool It Carol was based on a true story I had read in the News of the World," he explains. "But I gave it a happy ending, which annoyed everyone because apparently I was encouraging people to be promiscuous. I just saw it as pragmatic. Strangely enough, Cool It Carol did get quite good reviews and some critics even called it a serious piece of film-making. I think that's going too far, but it was certainly cynical: Swinging London was coming to an end and the film was showing that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be." In the early 1970s, Walker moved into horror. Then he discovered his ace in the hole: a sweet old Scottish jobbing actress called Sheila Keith who had an uncanny ability for playing depraved maniacs. Their working partnership began in 1974 with Frightmare. Keith takes the role of Dorothy Yates, a middle-class, tweed-clad, Home Counties mother of two whose thatched cottage holds a dark secret: her insatiable appetite for human flesh. In House of Whipcord, she plays a sadistic prison warden whose repressed lesbianism has driven her to torture beautiful young women for kicks. In The Confessional she steals the show as a one-eyed housekeeper and partner in crime to the film's murderous priest. "Sheila Keith was a lady who lived a quiet life with her dogs and her cats and came into work to do, brilliantly, whatever was asked of her," says Walker. "She was like your nice old aunt who would serve you cucumber sandwiches before ripping into a dismembered limb - without complaining." Keith specialised in depraved characters who committed acts of extreme brutality while sermonising on the virtues of a good and moral life. She came to symbolise the running theme through all of Walker's films: the abuse of authority. "At any given time at my school, 50% of the masters had their hands down boys' trousers," he claims. "Prison wardens must have an in-built sadism, otherwise why would they do that job? Judges do a holier-than-thou act every day. How dare these people pontificate to the rest of us? They're getting off on it!" Walker then launches into a tirade against Tony Blair, Catholic priests, Mary Whitehouse and pretty much every authority figure who has ever lived. Once he calms down, I point out that House of Whipcord begins with a dedication "to those who are disturbed by today's lax moral attitudes, and eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment", which rather goes against his libertine philosophy. "I worked with a great writer called Freddie Shaughnessy," says Walker, reclining into an anecdotal position in his armchair. "He was an Eton-educated pillar of the establishment - the Queen's first boyfriend, actually - and he gave me some very good advice: never let them know which side you are on." Nobody could accuse Walker of toeing the party line. The evil authority figures in his films usually get away with it, and the heroes and heroines almost always die. Walker stopped making films when, aged 41, he felt the cries of outrage begin to wane. He only became aware of the cult surrounding the films two years ago, after being invited to give a Q&A in front of 500 students and being asked about the subliminal themes of Frightmare and Cool It Carol. Did his films have hidden depths? "Of course they didn't. But recently I had to record commentary for the DVD releases, so I saw the films for the first time since making them, and you know what? They're not as bad as I thought. But searching for hidden meaning ... they were just films. All I wanted to do was create a bit of mischief." · The Pete Walker DVD Collection (Anchor Bay Entertainment) is released on March 21.

27-06-2007, 06:32 PM	#3
plasticmaggot has no status. Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: ireland Posts: 2 Country: iTrader: (0)	Pete Walker- director hi there. Anybody got any info on mr Pete Walker, he of schizo, house of mortal sin etc.. also, i'm trying to track down some of his early films, but alas, as yet no luck.

11-11-2007, 08:39 PM	#6
scenesixty has no status. Member Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: London Posts: 45 Country: iTrader: (0)	Sheila Keith I met Ms. Sheila Keith after a West End Saturday afternoon play 'Lettice and Lovage' (1990). I specifically wanted to meet her, so with a friend we knocked on the dressing room door. She was very gracious and pleasant, along with her wig mistress, she happily posed for a couple of photographs (I still have them) even by 1990, Sheila had became a bit of a celebrity! In 'Dr Terribles House Of Horrors' she reprised her 'Frightmare' role by reading Tarot cards (as Grandma Lee) in ''And now The Fearing Starts' a supremely gifted actress!

06-04-2008, 02:00 PM	#9
Amethyst_Isle is Very Happy Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: London Posts: 367 My Mood: Country: iTrader: (2)	Some of Pete Walker's films are pretty good when you can see how London was and other places too,which is a good thing imo as a lot of locations have Erm slightly changed from the 70's. __________________ There's a lot of dignity in that, isn't there? Going out like a raspberry ripple.

06-04-2008, 06:22 PM	#10
Shadwell is Your Humble Narrator Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Scotland Posts: 208 Country: iTrader: (0)	Shelia Keith was superb in "Firghtmare." heh heh. You certainly would want to mess with her. I like Pete Walker's films. Explotation? Bring it on.... __________________ Viddy well little brother, viddy well....

15-04-2005, 03:57 PM	#2
giallihaydw has no status. Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: essex(house on straw hill) Posts: 10 iTrader: (0)	Long live Walker!! Watched my new Anchor Bay DVD of FRIGHTMARE last night.It's still great,and despite the odd scratch looks as nice as it ever will! Sheila Keith RIP.

27-06-2007, 07:31 PM	#4
Hanseat has no status. Senior Member Join Date: May 2007 Location: Norfolk Posts: 127 Country: iTrader: (0)	One of the places to start (includes short bio): DVD Times - The Pete Walker Collection Hanseat

27-06-2007, 09:20 PM	#5
MarcMorris has no status. Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: London Posts: 315 Country: iTrader: (5)	I may be able to help - I worked on the Anchor Bay box set and produced the extras and audio commentaries. I'm still in touch with Walker too.

12-11-2007, 11:35 AM	#7
D Cairns has no status. Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Edinburgh Posts: 472 Country: iTrader: (0)	Walker is fascinating but I find the actual experience of watching his films totally unrewarding! I guess there's something interesting about how joyless and bleak and miserable they are. And HOUSE OF WHIPCORD should be commended for successfully avoiding any sado-erotic thrills whatsoever, meaning that it cheats the people who pay to see it and offends those who don't!

06-04-2008, 01:23 PM	#8
davidb is enjoying the banter......zzzz Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: welwyn garden city Posts: 767 My Mood: Country: iTrader: (1)	i get the impression of watching pete walkers films that all they were ever meant to be were exploitation movies ,it just being a complete fluke that the odd one like cool it carol turned into a b movie masterpiece

30-05-2008, 02:09 AM	#11
davidb is enjoying the banter......zzzz Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: welwyn garden city Posts: 767 My Mood: Country: iTrader: (1)	im currently watching the pete walker box set of horror films and theres one thing thats a common thread amongst pretty much all his films . they all feature an aston martin sports car ! [ sorry non car lovers but us petrolheads notice these things ] were they petes own cars at the time of production of the film ? theres a book out about him called making mischief ,perhaps the answer will be in that

30-05-2008, 07:52 AM	#12
m35541 has no status. Member Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: London Posts: 82 Country: iTrader: (0)	Walker's horror films are often shoddy and poorly acted but viewed as a whole they are at least a different take on things that the likes of what Amicus, Tigon and Hammer were doing and an attempt to relocate British horror firmly back into contemporary 1970's society. I think Frightmare is by far and away his best film and a genuinely nasty and effective English equivalent to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

30-05-2008, 11:54 AM	#13
davidb is enjoying the banter......zzzz Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: welwyn garden city Posts: 767 My Mood: Country: iTrader: (1)	i watched house of whipcord for the first time the other night . crikey how did he get away with it in the strict censorship 70s ? [ mary whitehouse would have had a heart attack ] for a film which is half of it just an excuse to put some t&a on screen ,it really had some atmosphere and makes you think about the subject of corporal and capital punishment .quite an achievment for an exploitation movie . Last edited by davidb; 30-05-2008 at 11:57 AM.

30-05-2008, 01:11 PM	#14
m35541 has no status. Member Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: London Posts: 82 Country: iTrader: (0)	House of Whipcord is pretty mild content wise for a 1974 film (we'd already had The Devils, Straw Dogs and The Exorcist by the time this came out).

30-05-2008, 08:27 PM	#15
Mr Flash has no status. Member Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: manchester Posts: 78 Country: iTrader: (2)	A few scans of the American press book for House of Whipcord, A.I.P. really knew how to sell a film!!!! http://img194.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06435_housewhiled-Scanned-000_123_242lo.jpg http://img111.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06443_housewhiled-Scanned-01_123_665lo.jpg http://img31.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06450_housewhiled-Scanned-02_123_1192lo.jpg http://img103.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06457_housewhiled-Scanned-03_123_1171lo.jpg http://img200.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06462_housewhiled-Scanned-04_123_243lo.jpg http://img7.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=06620_housewhiled-Scanned-05_123_899lo.jpg

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