Lipstick and Blood (1986)

Directed by:

"Robert Bauer" (Lindsay Shonteff)

Director Shonteff somehow managed to make it through nearly five decades in the business without ever creating much of a name for himself. Some would even go so far as to say he never made a single standout film, though I personally don't agree with that sentiment on the basis of at least one of his films. Though many assumed he was British, he was actually born and raised in Canada and started making movies there, starting with the seldom-seen low budget western The Last Gunfighter. Soon after, he relocated to the UK, where he'd remain for the rest of his life. He made his British debut with the ventriloquist's dummy-themed horror film Devil Doll (1964), which is actually pretty good but had its reputation sullied after being featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Curse of the Voodoo aka Voodoo Blood Death (1965) and He Kills Night After Night After Night aka Night Slasher (1969) soon followed. He made James Bond-style secret agent films and a handful of sexploitation features through the 70s and finally ended up here making this shot-on-video flick in the 80s. So just how well does an established director with loads of experience handle the SOV format? Better than the amateurs, right? Nope!

Jay Preston (Joseph Peters) is your standard maladjusted socially awkward pervert who has no friends, constantly talks to himself, owns an inflatable sex doll, lives alone in a tiny apartment with nude magazine layouts taped to the walls and frequents hookers. He picks up a middle-aged prozzie (Joyce Gray) and takes her home. After she refuses to kiss him on the mouth and then writes a nasty message on his mirror in lipstick he slits her throat (off-screen) and stuffs the body in his armoire.

Meanwhile, fried-haired tootsie Jennie (Jane Linten) is planning on getting married. Because she comes from a poor household, her parents (Janet Allen, Bill Riddout) can't help her out financially and her fiance Paul (Paul Ashe) apparently doesn't make enough as a millworker, she takes a job as a dancer (and a piss poor one to boot!) in one of the strangest and least convincing strip clubs perhaps ever. How strange? Well, it's filmed in a theater as opposed to a bar so there's this huge stage and theater-style seating with four audience members spaced out between literally hundreds of seats. Jennie appears to be the only dancer working there (no others are ever shown) and wears more clothes "stripping" than most women wear to the beach. Everyone keeps ragging on her to quit, but she's determined to save for a lavish wedding and threatens to do even worse ("Maybe I'll become a hooker? I heard it pays better.") if they don't back off.

Jay starts frequenting the club and becomes obsessed with Jennie despite her insistence on wearing a butt ugly costume consisting of shredded blue, white and orange rags and a bottom that's about as sexy as an adult diaper. He pulls out a gun and scares off two young patrons who make lewd comments about her then returns home, starts screaming at his sex doll ("You smell like plastic! Rotten whore!") and deflates it by stabbing it repeatedly with a knife while acting like he's getting off.

Jay finally works up the courage to offer Jennie a ride after work but she turns him down. Seeing her kissing Paul ("You bitch!") is the final straw. After she gets off work one afternoon, he pulls a gun on her and forces her into his car. She's driven out to a field, made to put on lipstick and forced her to dance before being raped off-screen. He then shows her the body of his previous victim in the trunk and tells her that'll be her if she doesn't do what he says. Now that the two are officially "lovers," he kidnaps Paul at work and executes him in a field. He then robs a gas station and shoots the attendant dead.

The film becomes a road movie of sorts as the two drive around and stay at various hotels. Occasionally Jay will kill someone, like a couple of American tourists (Burnell Tucker, Maggi-Anne Lowe) he lures into the woods and shoots so he can take their car, but for the most part he just sits around complaining. He quotes from the bible, constantly forces Jennie to dance (including with her clothes on in the shower), whines about being constipated and tells her she's "really fucking boring." Actually he ain't lyin' there. She IS fucking boring and just kind of sits around looking unperturbed most of the time. After awhile, he even starts losing interest in raping her because she refuses to change clothes or take care of her personal hygiene. "How can I fuck her when all she does is sleep? I'm gonna fuck a thousand pussies!"

Eventually, Jennie escapes and, instead of going to the police, hitches a ride to a bus station. That gives the psycho time to go to her home and kill both of her parents with a switchblade. He then goes through her things, sniffs her panties and rubs them all over his face before leaving the parents' bodies posed on the couch with a warning that she's next. Nine months pass. Jennie is still working at the club and makes frequent visits to the cemetery. Her brother (Bill French) tries to convince her to come stay with him and his wife but she refuses. Just what is she planning?

While this isn't horribly made for the shooting format and a few of the horror scenes are well done, it's all rather talky, repetitive, unoriginal and meandering. The dialogue is often terrible, it's not nearly sleazy enough and there's a subplot about the strip club manager (Chris Plume) illegally selling firearms that goes absolutely nowhere and seems grafted on solely to provide our heroine with a sawed-off shotgun whenever she needs it.

All things considered, most of the cast is competent. The supporting actors are generally fine and, though the male star is hammy at times thanks to the nature of the script (and some poor dialogue), he at least puts in some effort here and has his moments. The problem here is with the female lead. Her inability to act, dance or even show basic human emotion, plus the fact she's too old for this role and not particularly good looking, makes one wonder how exactly she ended up getting this part. They would have been better off casting a real-life stripper or a porn star. Sure, the acting probably would have still sucked but at least a pro could have put on a proper strip show and done some nude scenes!

Not surprisingly, this was just barely released and appears to have only been given video distribution in Germany (on the Toppic label) and the UK (through Movietime) in the early 80s. There's been nothing since then. Shonteff also made the SOV sci-fi film The Killing Edge (1984), which involves killer robots, at around the same time. There are a bunch of New Wave songs on the soundtrack by a group called Field of One. Though always listed as a 1984 release, the copyright date in the end credits is 1986.

★1/2

Nije ptica sve sto leti (1970)

... aka: A Bird Isn't All That Flies

... aka: It Is Not a Bird All Which is Flying

... aka: Not Everything That Flies Is a Bird

Directed by:

Borislav Šajtinac

In an land that's vaguely apocalyptic or at least post-war; a flat, dusty, barren wasteland with bones scattered about and trash blowing across the terrain like tumbleweed, an old man lives in a tiny, hastily and sloppily constructed wooden home. While it may be barely holding together, it's at least his and he has plans to fix it up. After his window falls off when he tries to open it, he retrieves some bricks and starts patching up the roof. As he's in the middle of improving his dwelling, a giant black monster bird decides to perch right on top of it; slowly crushing the home with its weight. The man tosses a rock at it, but the bird catches it in its mouth, swallows it and doesn't budge. An attempt to run it off with a scarecrow fails when it merely eats the scarecrow. Time to bring in the big guns. He returns with a small tank that shoots arrows, but the bird just eats it and then defecates him out. Reduced to groveling at the bird's talons, the man tries to wait it out into the night. Still, it refuses to leave, even when a thunderstorm erupts. The defeated man crawls back inside what's left of his home to try to wait it all out but when he emerges the next day the bird is still there ready to devour his remaining belongings and finish completely demolishing the home.

This 7-minute Yugoslavian animated short is described as "a parable of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia." While the message isn't exactly subtle (not that entrenching it in harder-to-decipher metaphor would have made it any deeper per se), this does spice things with up a brief surreal interlude featuring the bird hovering over the masses before entering a nude woman between the legs and then transforming her into a bird ("One of us! One of us") plus an amusingly cynical ending in the vein of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em", though the "join 'em" aspect is eventually accomplished via persistence, robbery and coercion! There's a distinct style to the animation, too, that I quite liked. Everything is meticulously sketched with thousands of little black ink lines and color is muted and only sparingly used.

Šajtinac was far more prolific as a painter, illustrator and drawer than as a filmmaker and would eventually relocate to, and work in, France. There have been many exhibitions of his work around the world and he's published a number of books over the years. He did manage to win the grand prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival the following year for another animated short he did called Nevesta / "The Bride" (1971).

This is given the extremely awkward English language title It Is Not a Bird All Which is Flying in the opening credits but is more widely known as Not Everything That Flies Is a Bird. Šajtinac eventually combined this with some of his other animated shorts and filmed new linking segments for the feature-length release Nicht alles was fliegt, ist ein Vogel (1978), which is also given the English title Not Everything That Flies Is a Bird. This is available to view on Youtube (there's no dialogue so need for subtitles) and is included on the DVD compilation Srpski animirani film 2 / "Serbian Animated Film 2," which was put out by The Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival.

★★1/2

Lesorub (1985)

... aka: Лесоруб

... aka: Lumberjack

... aka: Woodcutter

Directed by:

Evgeniy Yufit

The director's second short following his 3-minute-long WEREWOLF ORDERLIES (1984), this was an early entry in the Soviet Necrorealism / Parallel Cinema underground movement, which was basically started as a means to revolt against oppressive state control over their film industry, which included not just film production but also distribution.

The two-and-a-half minute intro features a TV reporter (played by the director himself) entering a small room that's decorated in creepy fashion with pictures of corpses, crime scene photos and skulls adorning the walls, hanging dolls, a stabbed teddy bear and other such ghoulery. He addresses the camera directly and starts talking but we don't hear anything because he doesn't have his microphone hooked up. Once he plugs it in, the camera suddenly cuts away. Even though nothing has really happened up to this point, this is already (visually) an improvement over Yusif's first short in that it's filmed and lit somewhat better and features actual art direction so at least it has that much going for it. This is still primitive stuff on the technical scale though... and the film seems to become even more primitive the further along it goes. So why the sudden change in quality? Well, the print of the original film currently sitting in archive runs 6 minutes while the one I viewed runs over 8, which means this better-shot opening sequence must have been grafted on at a later stage.

We meet a nameless man who is having a hard time walking down an icy road. He's one of many who have a zombie-like lurch to their gait. The basic task of walking becomes even more difficult when a mob dressed in back run by, push him down, tie a rope to his leg and start dragging him. We then go to an apartment building where a man tosses a dummy off a balcony. The title card informs us that despite the dummy's high fall, it "continued to function well." The dummy is then hung from a tree, put on train tracks and then saved from being run over but "dies" soon after anyway. The body is buried in the snow.

A "pseudo-tourist loser" on an excursion in the woods stumbles onto the body and the mob of men come and start beating him up. And then beat each other up. And then beat up a guy carrying a dead body on his back who in turn is beating up another guy with a briefcase who looks like he's about to picnic in the snow. We get brief flashes of a crazy tied-up man, a guy in drag dancing and some other such nonsense before learning that the "pseudo-tourist" is actually a "werewolf double." The real tourist has devoted his life to being a woodcutter. He stumbles around, knocks down some trees and collapses from exhaustion. Just another day for the working class. The mob then start flailing in the snow, punch and kick each other and hit each other with sticks while stock footage people release doves, point and cheer.

Cut between the frantic action are various stills and brief clips from films, shots of bugs eating a dead lizard, slaughtered pigs, an angry bear and more. It's all a deep and profound statement about... uh... well, scratch that... This is really just filmed anarchy against Soviet ideology, with people running amok engaged in poorly-choreographed depictions of suicide, murder and slapstick brawling accompanied by a tuneless song. The title cards somehow make it even less coherent than it otherwise would be, which is probably the point.

I always have a difficult time rating stuff like this. It has a certain historical significance and provokes some interest on that front. However, as much as I fully respect what these folks were doing, where they were doing it and why they were doing it, I appreciate what this symbolizes much more than the execution of the film itself.

★1/2

Sanitary-oborotni (1984)

... aka: Санитары-оборотни

... aka: Werewolf Orderlies

Directed by:

Evgeniy Yufit

Due to strict censorship in Soviet cinema at the hands of the state-controlled film production and distribution department Goskino (USSR State Committee for Cinematography), a group of anarchists and provocateurs arose in the early 80s who set out to cause a ruckus. This group initially started out as a secret club of sorts who'd congregate in the woods. They eventually got their hands on some primitive film equipment and began making their own silent shorts, which intentionally set out to do things, and show things, that the major studios wouldn't. And thus "Necrorealism" was born.

These shorts were crudely-made, chaotic, absurdist, filmed without dialogue (music was sometimes added later) and frequently improvised. Most of them were obsessed with death, decomposition, bodily invasion / transformation and the concept of empty existence; a society filled with people who are perhaps technically alive but more akin to zombies i.e. simultaneously living and dead. Many offered up images of fighting, murder, cruelty, suicide, cannibalism, sadism and sexual deviance as shock tactics. And since the government controlled the cinemas and, by proxy, the content of films being show in them, these shorts were only screened on the underground circuit. Yufit (sometimes Evgenii Iufit), a student at a technical college at the time, became the leader of this movement and even formed his own independent studio called Mzhalala Film, which was also the countries first independent studio, to work on these films.

Werewolf Orderlies was their inaugural effort. It runs just 3 minutes, is black-and-white, was ineptly shot on extremely scratchy (I think) 8mm, looks more like it was made in the 1910s than the 1980s and was more-or-less just improvised right there on the spot.

A sailor carrying a hacksaw exits a train, walks across some tracks and heads out into the woods. A bunch of men, only a few of which are actually dressed like orderlies, follow him. Other men are around aimlessly and frantically digging through the snow with shovels. The sailor makes a fire in front of a tree, climbs up it and then jumps into a blanket held by the orderlies. They drag him into the middle of a field and he's killed after being beaten with shovels and having a tree branch thrown on top of him. We then see shots of a battleship and waves, probably taken from some war / propaganda film. There are no werewolves. The end.

What this started and why this even exists in the first place are both much more interesting topics to ponder than actually sitting through this silly no budget home movie. I'm assuming the stick-it-to-the-status-quo aspect comes from seeing a military man being senselessly killed, which, in a way, is a sort of anti-propaganda I guess. Yufit made a number of these shorts in the 80s before graduating to features like Daddy, Father Frost Is Dead (1991) and Silver Heads (1999) in the 90s. He passed away in 2016. His shorts now play at film festivals and are screened at colleges and such, plus they're on Youtube if you're interested.

★1/2