Preaching to the Perverted is a 1997 British sex comedy-drama written and directed by Stuart Urban. Guinevere Turner stars in her first lead as Tanya Cheex, a New York dominatrix transplanted into London’s fetish underground; Tom Bell plays moral-crusading MP Henry Harding; Christien Anholt is Peter Emery, the naïve tech recruit sent to spy on her. Real BDSM performance artists populate the club world—Chaos Clowns, Luci the Axle Grinder (Lucifire), Miss Kimberly, The Fetish Nun, Suzi Woodroffe, Tutu, and others—so the film’s dungeon aesthetics often look lived-in rather than pure Hollywood invent.
The BBC originally developed the project, then dropped the script as unbroadcastable on UK television. Irony followed: in April 2004 the finished film aired on terrestrial BBC One. Irish film censor Sheamus Smith banned it in the Republic of Ireland on 28 October 1997 and banned the subsequent video release as well. A trailer mishap forced a mass recall of the rental VHS of Donnie Brasco (itself passed as an 18) because the trailer had not been classified—about 3,300 cassettes withdrawn and replaced, with potential €1000 fines for shops that still rented the bad stock. A 2003 U.S. video release was cut for an age rating. In 2013 the movie became the first European feature restored and remastered via Kickstarter fan funding; the remastered Blu-ray arrived in August 2013.
Plot
Henry Harding MP, on a purity campaign, hires virgin computer whiz Peter Emery—employee of a Christian tech firm called Holy Hardware—to infiltrate the UK BDSM scene. Harding wants to destroy “House of Thwax,” the club run by Mistress Tanya Cheex, and believes secretly videotaped evidence of the club’s play will sink her. Peter, however, likes Tanya; the spy falls for the Domme. Among locations, Layer Marney Tower in Essex anchors a major party sequence—historic English brick framing modern fetish spectacle.
The comic engine is classic culture-war farce: moral panic versus dungeon competence, church hardware versus House of Thwax, and a soft-hearted bottom-adjacent spy who discovers that consent, performance, and community rules make more sense than parliamentary outrage.
Critical Reception
Empire’s Jake Hamilton praised Turner as making Sharon Stone look like a mother superior, noted fiendish cameos (Tom Bell, Ricky Tomlinson, and others), and urged viewers to “put on your mask and enjoy the party,” calling the ballsy British independent deserving of respect. The Independent on Sunday’s “Dillie Tante” heard a mesh of glamour and hilarity—slick, well cast, strong dialogue. Secret Magazine (February 2003) highlighted excellent costumes, good acting, and a convincing vision of a quality fetish club—“highly recommended.” The Times (27 April 2004, TV preview) found it “enjoyably offbeat.” Curve Magazine compared it to a high-tech, fast-paced Moulin Rouge for the fetish world and shrugged that of course Ireland banned it. i-D (1997) liked the original setting and sumptuous styling. Erotic Review (December 2002) said the club scenes look fabulous through intelligent color and light.
Not every critic converted. Qwipster’s Movie Reviews (December 2003) allowed that active S&M participants might enjoy the lighthearted underground portrait but argued anyone wanting more than an offbeat sex comedy would be disappointed—that the film “lives up to its name by not being able to appeal to anyone but perverts.” That sneer is itself cultural data: mainstream reviewers still treating “pervert” as both subject and insult.
Later prestige catches up. In 2015 The Guardian ranked the film among the top ten BDSM-related movies. A 2020 BFI retrospective on BDSM in cinema flagged it for a “rare example of a dominatrix presented as a fully fledged character” and for making “very explicit the vital importance of consent and boundaries in any sadomasochistic encounter or relationship.”
Awards and Soundtrack Snapshot
Guinevere Turner won Best Actress at the 1999 Festival du Jeune Comédien; the film took a 2002 Audience Choice Award at the CineKink Festival. The soundtrack CD stacks club-oriented cuts: Magnus & Maya tracks such as “Welcome to the House of Thwax,” “Journey Into Hell,” “Postman Always Thrice,” “In Zerbra Suspension,” “Enlightenment,” “Goodmorning Mistress,” “On Wasteland (Requiem Flagellum),” “Grindecontrol Transubmission,” and “House of Thwax”; plus Shimmon & Wolfson “Evil Queen,” Rejuvination “Sycophantasy,” Mark Broom “The Alien Spoke,” The Aloof “Mind,” Way Out West “Ajare,” Omni Trio “Who Are You,” Percy X “Aerobix,” Amethyst “Futura,” and more. The playlist is pure late-’90s fetish-club energy under the film’s comedy.
Why Kink Audiences Still Cite It
Related topics include sadism and masochism in fiction and the UK legal shadow of Operation Spanner—the real-world context that made moral-panic plots feel less fictional. Preaching to the Perverted is not a technique manual; it is a soft-landing comedy that still centers a Domme as protagonist, stages club culture with actual scene performers, and—per later BFI reading—puts consent and boundaries on the table. For adult viewers hunting pre-Fifty Shades mainstream-adjacent fetish film, Urban’s movie remains a key British artifact: banned in Ireland, kicked off the BBC development slate, later shown on BBC One, restored by its own fans, and still one of the friendliest narrative portraits of a working Mistress on European screens.
