House on Straw Hill
a.k.a. Exposé / Trauma
1976 · Directed by James Kenelm Clarke · UK
House on Straw Hill aka Exposé is a 1976 British exploitation gem written and directed by James Kenelm Clarke. It stars genre heavyweights Udo Kier and Linda Hayden. Due to part-financing by smut merchant Paul Raymond, his girlfriend Fiona Richmond has a significant part as the girlfriend of Kier’s character.
Filmed on a balmy summer in Essex, England, Kier is a paranoid writer and Hayden his secretary, hired to help finish his second novel. What you get is a heady mix of sleaze and sex, and two thuggish youths who find themselves at the wrong end of a smoking shotgun.
Kier plays the edgy, paranoid writer with his usual nervy flair, and Hayden pouts, plots and manipulates. Richmond gets naked a lot and tries to keep up with the proper actors. Kier said of Richmond that “she was a famous person trying to be naked in a movie” — Richmond was better known for recording an album of readers’ letters from top-shelf magazine Men Only than for her thespian skills, and it shows.
House on Straw Hill was cut for its cinema release and received an outright ban in the UK when an uncut version turned up on video — landing it on the Video Nasties list. In 2013, Severin Films released it on DVD and Blu-ray, splicing two prints together to give the film its most complete, uncut cut yet.
