House of Mortal Sin aka The Confessional (Pete Walker, 1976)

You may recall that I reviewed another Pete Walker movie, The Comeback, a few months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it even though many Walker superfans think it's one of his weakest films. With my second foray into the Pete Walker oeuvre, I may be joining those superfan ranks (but I will never think The Comeback is weak).

The two Walker films I've seen so far share a rich color palette, a striking sense of both interior and exterior space, and a strong visual point of view with confident mastery of atmosphere and tone, and both of them manage to exist comfortably within their contradictions (subtlety and garishness, realism and expressive exaggeration, seriousness and tongue-in-cheek humor, warmth and ultra-bleak pessimism, tastefulness and bad taste). I like the cut of this Walker fella's jib.

House of Mortal Sin, also known as The Confessional and The Confessional Murders in some prints and video versions, is an oddball character study of a demented Catholic priest, a slasher movie, a suspense thriller, a blistering critique of enforced celibacy in the priesthood, and a charming snapshot of Surrey, England in the mid-1970s. It also contains one of my favorite lines of dialogue, spoken with withering contempt: "I have little regard for the whims of renegade Belgian cardinals!" I was raised Catholic, so a horror movie about a killer priest really gets my mojo working, but I'm pretty sure I would enjoy this movie no matter my religious background. By the way, it's no spoiler that the priest is a murderous psychopath. The film gives you that information pretty early in the running time.

Another thing House of Mortal Sin shares with The Comeback is a cast full of intriguing characters, several of whom share space in a visually appealing location. In this case, those locations are a tchotchke shop in downtown Surrey with living quarters above the shop, and a demonic-looking small Catholic church with adjoining rectory and cemetery. Characters frequently mention how close the church is to the library, but, alas, we never get a glimpse of that library.

About those characters. Jenny Welch (Susan Penhaligon) is a young woman living with her sister Vanessa (Stephanie Beacham) in the apartment above Vanessa's knick-knack shop. Jenny's on-again, off-again boyfriend Terry (Stewart Bevan) sometimes lives there, too, to Vanessa's annoyance. Terry is a record plugger, which in UK parlance means he's either a guy who pitches unsigned bands to record labels or a guy who tries to get singles played on radio stations. Either way, he gets a lot of free records, which is the only thing Vanessa likes about him.

One afternoon, Jenny absentmindedly walks into traffic and narrowly misses a collision with a car. That car is driven by old friend Bernard Cutler (Norman Eshley), who, in the years since they lost touch, has become a hip, young Catholic priest. Father Bernard reconnects with Jenny and Vanessa (whom he once dated and is still attracted to, despite his priestly vows), and, in between places to live while he assists the neighborhood priest and awaits an assignment of his own, moves in with the sisters above their shop.

That night, Jenny, upset from her most recent breakup with Terry and the circumstances surrounding it, rushes to the church to speak to Bernard for advice but is rattled when he's not on duty. Instead, she ends up in a confessional talking to the aforementioned neighborhood priest, Father Xavier Meldrum (Anthony Sharp, giving it all he's got and a couple barrels more, and coming off performances in Barry Lyndon and the hilariously titled One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing and The Amorous Milkman).

Father Meldrum is one crazy, unpleasant, and creepy son of a bitch, to put it mildly, and Jenny's ill-timed confessional visit is enough to make him dangerously obsessed with her. This obsession leads to Meldrum stalking and harassing Jenny and killing anyone else who gets in his way. Jenny tries to tell everyone about Meldrum, but no one believes her because she's a young woman and Meldrum is a priest, with a cunning ability to cover his tracks even as his behavior becomes more brazen.

Meldrum's domestic life is almost as insane as he is. His mute, frail, and elderly mother lives in an upstairs bedroom of the rectory, reachable by a small, manual elevator, and Meldrum frequently and obliviously unloads disturbing monologues about his desire for Jenny onto his clearly freaked out old mum. She gets even worse treatment from the housekeeper/caretaker, Miss Brabazon (Sheila Keith, veteran of several Walker films), a sadistic and slyly funny weirdo with one darkly tinted frame in her eyeglasses and a decades-long secret.

House of Mortal Sin did not please British Catholics, and the film was the subject of much controversy in the UK upon initial release. Not even two sympathetic (but anti-celibacy) priest characters could make up for one homicidal one and a consistent critique of church policy. For the non-prudes among you who love horror movies with well-developed characters, a strong visual point of view, loads of atmosphere, great locations, some pretty sweet kills, and righteous takedowns of institutional hypocrisy, however, House of Mortal Sin is well worth your time. I'm ready for more Pete Walker.