Blu-Ray Review: ‘HOUSE ON STRAW HILL’

Steel eyed Udo Kier plays paranoid control-freak writer Paul Martin in the new Blu-Ray release of House on Straw Hill. Originally released in 1976, and shot over the course of three weeks, back when Keir still had hair and gorgeous Brit Linda Hayden was fresh from her performance in the horror cult film, The Blood On Satan’s Claw.

Keir’s character, successful writer Paul Martin, decides to retreat to the country after becoming overwhelmed by the publicity he gained with the reception of his first novel. Martin has everything: he’s handsome, drives a Rolls Royce, has his suits made 0n Saville Row, and his staffed country hideaway leaves him with nothing but time to write a follow-up to his novel, Deadly Silence.

But that’s just the problem. There’s too much time. Either Paul’s got a serious case of writers block, or he’s going crazy. He’s starting to have vivid hallucinations that involve bloody knives, and even his own death. What’s worse is that his temporary departures to the slasher movie playing in his head occur when he puts on his rubber gloves in order to have kinky sex with his girlfriend Suzanne, played by Fiona Richmond – a popular 70’s English glamor model . This foreshadowing scene at the beginning of the movie is a bit of a punch in the gut. Suzanne and Paul’s sex scene is graphic, with Suzanne looking more like a demon than her page six self, while Paul is in full-on delusion mode envisioning a man with a knife breaking in through a window, or his bloody gloved hands frantically washing themselves in the sink. Until the point of climax snaps him out of it. And once Straw Hill pushes the limits of sex, violence and bloodshed, it never stops trying to make you squirm like a voyeur watching it projected through a peephole.

After Paul’s rough night of sex and imagined bloodshed, he’s tense and distracted. He sends Suzanne packing, warning her to keep his location a “secret”. He then has a stressful conversation with his literary agent, Leo, who’s hassling him about the progress of his latest book. This sends Paul back into his bedroom, where he locks the door and immediately has another hallucination in daylight, that has him slitting his wrists and dying in a puddle of blood in the bathtub. But he’s snapped back to reality by another call from Leo, who tells him he’s sending a typist along to help get the book finished.

When Paul heads out to pick up his new typist from the train station, he is greeted by braless typist Linda, played by Linda Hayden. When Paul sees her, he’s obviously turned on. But so are two local roughnecks, who follow Linda to Paul’s car. Things get punchy, and Paul quickly dispatches of the two brutes with his Karate skills.

When they arrive back at the house, Paul runs down his obsessive daily routine to a disinterested Linda. On her way to her room, eying a shotgun on a wall above a flickering lamp, Linda asks how far the house is from anything. Dun-Dun-DUN! The camera then follows her upstairs where she make a pit stop to snoop around in Paul’s murder sex room, finding his rubber gloves. When she’s done there, she heads to her room, unpacks her nearly empty suitcase. She removes a publicity photo of Paul, and a framed photo of another man, and a white dildo. She disrobes and starts to masturbate to the framed photo. The unexpected and unsettling scene ends with Linda coming back downstairs with coffee to Paul telling her she took “too long”. But Linda doesn’t care, and the unraveling of Paul Martin has begun.

After taking dirty dictation from Paul, Linda goes out for a walk, is happened upon while masturbating in the meadow by same the two English hooligans, this time armed with a shotgun, and is raped. The next time we see our rapists is when they are bleeding all over the straw field as Linda walks away all too calmly from her assault, telling Paul nothing when she arrives back at the house. She tells the elderly caretaker to take a few days off – Paul gets loaded, and we learn that one of the shotgun rapists is still alive. Paul passes out on the floor and has another bloody hallucination, the first outside of the sexy murder room, but this time it stars Linda with a knife, and a bloody bathtub.

When Paul wakes up on the floor the next day, all hell breaks loose. Linda murders the suspicious caretaker who returned to the house unannounced. Paul once again tries to get it on with Linda, but she puts him off telling him they need to wait until the book is finished. This pisses Paul off and he sends for Suzanne, and gives Linda the boot. The conclusion of Straw Hill then spins completely out of control in a thrilling collage of blood-splatter, graphic sex, and murder.

Despite the overkill when it comes to exploitative sex scenes, and it’s heavy use of foreshadowing, Straw Hill is a decent thriller full of twists and turns. It’s also perhaps Udo Kier’s best performance as a man grappling with his inner demons. Sadly, Hayden’s performance while on par or rivaling Keir’s at times, ends up being overshadowed by the time she spends on camera performing sexually explicit scenes that only put dents in her seemingly iron clad tough-girl-out-for-revenge exterior. For the era, Straw Hill is ahead of it’s time when it comes to its shock value, as well as a screen play that puts a woman in the role of a blood-thirsty, vengeful antagonist. Unfortunately, toward the end of the film I think the seemingly endless scenes between Linda Hayden and Fiona Richmond were overkill and unnecessary. Perhaps not when it comes to Richmond, but more for Hayden who had three successful movies under her 23-year-old belt in 1976. That said, for all it’s deviant faults, the nearly 40-year-old film still stands up as solid flick with an X-rated edge. And that’s not so bad.

The Presentation

It’s important to note that Straw Hill was made on the cheap for a mere $50,000, and the Blu-Ray was mastered to Hi-Def from a badly water-damaged original negative and two worn-out 35mm prints. And its wear and tear is evident throughout the film – showing varied colors and brightness as well as vintage vertical scratches that are almost ever-present. Luckily, the film’s audio quality was greatly improved. So much so that it’s quite difficult to pick up on Udo Keir’s dubbed voice. But none of these things take too much away from the film as the story quickly becomes weirder and more worrisome.

Special Features
An Angel for Satan – An interview with Linda Hayden

This extra features a short, but nicely done interview with Linda Hayden as she reflects on her career. She talks with affection about Christopher Lee and another vintage Dracula, Peter Cushing, as well as Vincent Price, who was amused by Hayden’s constant adjustment of her cleavage during scene changes.

When Hayden, who was only 18 at the time, recalling her experience shooting The Blood on Satan’s Claw, she shares a rather sad reflection about Patrick Wymark, who played the unforgettable Judge in Claw, implying that the beloved Wymark’s fatal heart attack three months after Satan’s Claw was released, was caused alcoholism. Then, Hayden gets honest about Straw Hill.

I wasn’t surprised to hear Linda Hayden say that she regrets making Straw Hill. She calls the film “sleazy”. She also takes aim at co-star Fiona Richmond, saying that the daughter of a Reverend turned nudie sex symbol, really shouldn’t have been in the film because she regularly “showed her body for a living”. And what about uber-stud, Udo Keir? Hayden thought he had a “filmable face”. Despite her directness regarding Straw Hill during the short interview, Hayden comes off as very likable and seems enriched by her experiences. Her story as an actress is an interesting one and as I’ve mentioned previously on Destroy the Brain, I think Hayden’s performance in Claw opened the door for other powerful roles for women like Sissy Spacek Carrie. It’s a must watch.

Audio Commentary with director James Kenelm Clarke and Producer Brian Smedly-Aston

The discussion between director James Kenelm Clark and producer Brian Smedly-Aston talking gore and glove is highly amusing. In general, I find it easy to listen to pretty much anything anyone with a British accent has to say, even if they are asking me to take out the garbage. Watching the Clarke and Aston talk so matter-of -factly about a film that nearly got an x-rating is strangely comedic, especially since they both look more like Ivy League history professors rather than purveyors of  “video nasties”.