“I have more toys… upstairs!”

It’s the 1970s and young girls look remarkably like fully-grown women with their hair in pigtails. One of these is happily pretending to know what hopscotch is when she’s approached by a Sinful Dwarf (Torben Bille) who entices her to a dark and forbidding building with the offer of playing with / staring gormlessly at a battery-powered toy dog.

Whilst she focuses on the yapping antics of the toy, he clobbers her with his walking stick, and the titles start – titles with lots of suspiciously Danish-looking words, but also with the kind of vaguely nausea-inducing bright colours and shitty wind-up toys you’d see in 1970s children’s TV shows like Pipkins. So that’s confusing. What the hell are we watching here?

Well, it’s not long before we find out. The girl is thrown naked into a dirty room full of other screaming naked girls, while teddy bears get eviscerated and filled with drugs.

Oh, it’s that kind of film.

Next to arrive at the dark, forbidding building no-one in their right mind would ever go anywhere near even if they were desperate to find accommodation is a young couple, Peter (Tony Eades) and Mary (Anne Sparrow).

The building is a boarding house run by a landlady who looks like she’s failed the auditions for the Rocky Horror Picture Show (complete with white face and nasty scar) and her Sinful Dwarf son Olaf (yup, him again).

The couple are shown to a room on the top floor, complete with “nice soft bed, hee hee” (Olaf). Things like acting and character motivation aren’t really particularly on show here (in fact the landlady appears to be making up her lines on the spot) and just in case you were wondering exactly what might be the reason for any lack of professionalism on the part of the cast, we then get an extended and graphic sex scene between Peter and Mary, watched through a hole in the wall by a gurning Olaf.

Oh, it’s that kind of film.

After what feels like hours of watching Peter’s naked arse going up and down, Olaf heads off to see the girls in his attic dungeon. A Sinful Dwarf’s work is never done. It’s worth pointing out here to modern audiences that I’m very doubtful there was an intimacy coordinator on-set during this shoot. Or for that matter, any regard given for anyone’s welfare. When I say “naked women”, I mean very naked. Somewhat too naked for comfort. And while we’re discussing this particular section of the film, if it’s Olaf’s job to regularly visit the girls and inject them with the heroin they crave (a Sinful Dwarf has to have a hobby), why is the door bolt just out of his reach, necessitating constant recourse to a box for him to stand on to reach it?

Peter leaves Mary alone in the room (oh-oh) while he goes out to look for work as a TV scriptwriter (good luck with that one, pal). “I’ll get some fruit or something and make it a little more like home,” she announces (insert “nice pear” joke here… sadly, it’s not that kind of film).

The reason for the naked attic dungeon quickly becomes clear, as Olaf brings in a series of seedy-looking men in to have sex with the girls. “You know what to do, just ring the bell when you’re finished”.

Meanwhile his mother is downstairs reliving her previous life as a nightclub owner with an elderly friend, the pair getting hammered on gin as they reminisce (and I don’t think that’s water in the bottle). An impromptu song-and-dance routine by the landlady is intercut with the rapes, now with funky music soundtracking them. Just in case they weren’t inappropriate enough.

The landlady reveals she has designs on “the blonde” (Mary), but they’ll have to get the husband out of the way first. And Mary, bored of her life in the tiny room, has started exploring the house (a discovery of a mouse in the teabags prompts more screaming than has so far been heard in the rest of the film, which is surprising, really).

A disillusioned Peter has put his dreams of TV writing on hold and unwittingly got a job with a toyshop owner called “Santa Claus”, who also happens to be the landlady’s drug supplier, bringing in heroin inside the toys (hence the teddy bear evisceration at the beginning of the film).

And now, with Peter out of the way as Santa’s new drugs mule, Mary finds herself in a considerable amount of trouble. There’s a bit of reasonable tension in a cat-and-mouse search around the house before Mary is caught, bundled into the dungeon room, stripped and tied up. Her eyebrows-aloft reaction to what she sees happening in there would be amusing if what she was seeing wasn’t so nasty.

There’s more low-jinks as things motor towards a horrible ending which ups the ante considerably in the tastelessness stakes. Put it this way, every time you think they won’t go there, they go there. Although the inclusion of fully tooled-up “British” police officers with a dubious approach to justice (“do you know how to use a gun?”) is enough to make you remember “it’s only a movie”.

There’s no recommendations to be had here. In fact, I’m kind of annoyed at whoever it was who first decided this qualified as a British horror film. Still, it’s done now and I can’t unsee it…