WHIRLPOOL - I have a lot of time for Larraz. He brought us two pinnacles of UK horror in 'Vampyres' and 'Symptoms', striking exercises in misty melancholia for the grotty seventies. 'Whirpool' is proto- all that stuff. It's about a 'sensitive young man' (read - a very specific kind of sixties / seventies English post-'Psycho' psycho a la Hywel Bennet in 'Twisted Nerve') who takes photographs in his 'Aunt's country house, where something bad happened to their last houseguest - we don't know what exactly but people keep mentioning it in hushed tones. Her replacement, a model there ostensibly for a weekend photoshoot, soon finds herself up to her neck in saucy mind games. I really like 'Whirlpool'. It has that early seventies 'NEL paperback' feel I adore in Brit stuff of its vintage - trashy psychosexual pulp dolled up in groovy glad rags, but with that tawdry, curdled postwar English vibe pulsating in the background; you can practically smell the incense curling around decommissioned stacks of ration-era Spam. It might be that the Eurohorror dialogue is at once stilted and over-ripe, the performances distracted and rickety, the flow plagued by stretches of nonaction and filler, and all of these misfires can seem charming or not. But there's this very slight magic in the air, and, in the forest, there's a mystery dude playing a flute! As soon as he appeared in the graveyard, I knew that this was the film for me. Threesome-based sleaze fades in and out, an hilarious encounter with the village drug dealer takes a dark turn, and the end is pretty brutal - I can see why people make LHOTL comparisons. It may not demonstrate the command of his better-known films, but 'Whirlpool' is a worthy precursor to those movies that have put Larraz on the map.
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