A Mulher Que Põe a Pomba no Ar (1978)

... aka: Woman Who Makes Doves Fly, The

... aka: Woman Who Put Doves In the Air, The

Directed by:

"J. Avelar" (José Mojica Marins)

Rosângela Maldonado

Here's one from the Coffin Joe universe you may have missed. Unlike some of his better-known / distributed cult titles, this has never been released here in America nor is it available in English. I actually couldn't find evidence of a VHS release in any country, including Brazil, and ended up viewing this on Youtube using their auto-translate function for the Portuguese subs. As per usual, these translations are a mess and often incomprehensible but they were just enough to get me through this. Furthermore, the only available copy of this title isn't in very good condition (soft picture with a green and sometimes yellow tint) and has a time clock near the bottom of the screen at all times so I had to both enhance the image and crop the bottom third off of all these screen caps. I did this for the same reason I erase film company logos and such whenever they're present: aesthetics. I simply don't like looking at them!

Marins is listed as "technical director" under the name "J. Avelar" but he has a co-director on this outing: Rosângela Maldonado. Maldonado had been a collaborator with Marins starting with his Finis Hominis ("End of Man") back in 1971 and also appeared in his 1972 adventure Sexo E Sangue na Trilha do Tesouro ("Sex and Blood on the Treasure Trail") prior to this. Though she shares directorial credit, this and her follow-up, A Deusa de Mármore / "The Marble Goddess" (1978), which involves a 2000-year-old woman preserving her youth through a Satanic pact, are technically the very first genre features made by a female director in Brazil. In addition, she also has the lead role, wrote the script, produced, did the art direction AND composed some of the music!

Things center around a platinum blonde lesbian scientist named Adelaide (Maldonado) who runs a secret organization of women who work out of her mansion. She has three faithful assistants - Rosângela (Luandy Maldonado), Diana (Dallas Kayan) and another whose name I didn't catch (Marta Lupiani), plus a chauffeur named Nelson (Arlindo Xavier) and a flamboyant male servant (Ivan Lima) in lieu of your traditional female maid. The gay servant is used for extremely embarrassing comic relief as he prances around dusting, singing and acting like a sex-crazed queen. He's secretly in love with Nelson (who slaps him in the face and pushes him down at one point cause he keeps coming on to him) and even has a homemade Nelson sex doll in his bedroom.

Adelaide is working on some kind of secret formula that will help cure men of their wandering eye. To gather data, she also runs a feminist support group full of angry women whose husbands have all been caught cheating on them. Their stories are all written down by the assistants. While working in her lab one day, Adelaide accidentally drops a test tube and the fumes infect her and Rosângela. The result? Well, it appears the formula has somehow transformed them into flying dove monsters who then go around attacking unfaithful men and their mistresses!

The hilarious dove costumes include round papier-mâché bird heads with floppy beaks, white feathered crop tops and panties, fabric flapper wings, body paint and go-go boots. They show up at a "picnic" of one of the cheating husbands and karate chop him and his mistress. They then go to a bawdy banquet / swinger's orgy (where Coffin Joe makes a brief cameo being fed grapes) and start beating people up. A dove woman breaks into a hotel room, cock blocks a man by climbing into bed and pecking his mistress and then is seen flying above the city by pedestrians. Word soon gets around town and newspaper headlines are wondering whether the creatures are ghosts or beings from Mars and wondering whether or not the dove women's reign of terror will end adultery once and for all.

If only this would have kept its focus on the dove women it may have been pretty consistently hilarious but sadly much more time is spent elsewhere. There's a long and seemingly pointless scene at a soccer match where a fight breaks out in the audience. The gay servant has a bizarre erotic dream where Adelaide and her girls are dyking it out as he (dressed in drag) and Nelson watch, which prompts the object of his affections to finally accept his love. After waking up and finding out it was only a dream, he destroys his sex doll during a temper tantrum. Three cheating husbands rent a boat for them and their mistresses to mess around on but their party is crashed by the wives, who attack them with whips and force them to abandon ship at gunpoint. And so on.

Adelaide has a flashback to when she was seventeen and in love with a boy who (kind of?) raped her by a waterfall. When his parents found out they sent him away to live elsewhere. Presumably this traumatic event has turned her into a man-hating lesbian (cause that's how it always works in real life, right?) and so she's taken Rosângela, who is young enough to be her daughter and may actually be her daughter since the actress playing her has the same last name, as her new lover. A white pill is introduced that seems to give the dove girls special powers but it's only shown in one scene. This just completely peters out by the end when the police get involved.

More of a lightweight sex farce than anything else, this has lots of terrible juvenile comedy and topless nudity plus serious underpinnings that they're completely unable to pull off in any kind of interesting or compelling way. It doesn't help matters that this is horribly-made across the board, with especially awful photography and editing. There are tons of close-up shots, zoom shots, shots going out of focus, jerky camerawork and rapid fire cuts. The acting is terrible and the script is poorly-written. There are too many characters and the attempts at humor are almost always embarrassing. While this provides a couple of unintentional laughs and crosses into WTF?! territory a number of times (and I know it sounds pretty amazing), it's not consistent enough in either area to really make it a good SBIG film.

The cast includes Heitor Gaiotti (from The Extra-Terrestrial Cat in Boots) and Marins film regulars David Húngaro and Walter Portela. Instead of your usual boring text opening credits, this has an announcer clad in a leisure suit and bell bottoms at a disco reading off the names of the stars, who then enter from off-stage and wave as animated birds fly across the screen with their names on banners and an audience cheers. That was a cute touch at least. I also laughed out loud when test tubes in the doctor's lab are shown spinning on a record player instead of a centrifuge.

★1/2

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