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Badmovies.org Forum  |  Information Exchange  |  Movie Reviews  |  LIPSTICK (1976): A plot summary, so you don't have to see it « previous next »
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Author Topic: LIPSTICK (1976): A plot summary, so you don't have to see it  (Read 3167 times)
Rev. Powell
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« on: April 02, 2008, 04:25:30 PM »

This turned out much longer than the plot outline I originally intended.  I just hated this movie so much, I couldn't stop writing about it.



In 1976, big-budget schlock producer Dino DeLaurentiis (DANGER: DIABOLIK, BARBARELLA, KING KONG) noticed two grave injustices in society.  The first was the outdated English common law custom of allowing irrelevant evidence of a rape victim’s past sexual history into trial, thereby prejudicing especially retarded juries into concluding the complainant was a lying slut.  The second was that he didn’t yet have enough money in his bank account to purchase a Caribbean island from a cash-strapped banana republic.  Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, Dino decided to put together a lucrative package for a major motion picture that would educate the curious American public about the horrors of graphic rape, whether in the bedroom or the courtroom. 

The one thing Dino felt was absolutely necessary to guarantee explosive box office returns was that the film star the naked granddaughter of a famous American novelist.  After seeing the results of Rainbeaux Faulkner and Tabitha Scott Fitzgerald’s screen tests, he settled on Margaux Hemmingway.   

Margaux’s only previous public exposure was as a fashion model, so her debut in LIPSTICK as a fashion model/rape victim seemed almost natural.  In fact, she’s almost convincing in the role, at least until she becomes a rape victim. 

She starts out by going out to the beach and taking off her top while some guys photograph her.  This topless scene is necessary to the plot because it establishes her as a character who will take off her clothes when someone points a camera at her, which is one of the main reasons Dino wanted to hire her.  Margaux’s  kid sister (Mariel Hemmingway, also debuting as the kid sister of a fashion model) attends the shoot, along with her music teacher, experimental composer Chris Sarandon, who lugs along his briefcase-sized mobile 8-track player  because he wants to meet Margaux and eventually ‘play his tapes’ for her, if you catch my drift.  But Marguax’s too busy snuggling with her boyfriend after the shoot to talk to him, so Chris arranges to drop by and play her his compositions sometime when she’s all alone at her apartment. 

When he gets to Margaux’s high-rise the doorman has to buzz her while she’s showering, but luckily she has a phone next to the shower stall so she can answer the phone without getting out.  This nude shower scene is totally necessary to the plot, because it establishes Margaux as a character who is very hygienic and too busy to take time out of her schedule to put on clothes before answering the phone.  Anyway, after he gets buzzed up, Chris Sarandon tries to explain his compositional philosophy to Margaux, but because he uses full sentences she gets this deer in the headlights look on her face like President Bush at a lecture on “Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Islamic World.”  So he just plays the music for her instead, which sounds like he recorded a bunch of constipated whales and mixed them with those “waka-waka” noises from Ms. Pacman.  But then Marguax gets a call from her boyfriend and stops paying attention and even puts her fingers in her ears and Chris Sarandon gets this crazy look because she’s ignoring him.  So when she’s done with the call he breaks a picture of her priest brother and starts groping her and slapping her around and tearing her clothes off and gets a tube of lipstick and smears it over her mouth and ties her up and sodomizes her and pulls out a switchblade and runs it across her naked body and starts raping her some more.  He doesn’t stop even when Mariel walks in on them.  Dino insisted that the rape scene go on for about twenty minutes just so the audience would understand that Chris Sarandon is actually a really bad guy, despite being a brilliant composer of whale electronica. 

So after this brutal violation Margaux walks around with a shellshocked expression and a glassy-eyed stare, just like before.  But despite her unchanged exterior, all is not well inside, so she goes to District Attorney Anne Bancroft anyway and asks to prosecute Chris Sarandon.  Anne warns her that if she testifies, Chris Sarandon’s lawyers are “going to try to terrify you, degrade you, control you, humiliate you,” and Margaux just nods, because that’s the same thing her agent said  when he told her she would be working with Dino De Laurentiis. 
   
Here's where the movie starts slowing down to insert the social commentary about how the system rapes the victim a second time by allowing the defense attorney to show the jury topless photos of the victim and ask her whether she was fantasizing about oral or anal sex when the picture was taken.  This entire line of questioning is mostly a setup for Anne Bancroft’s to loudly object “Your honor, it must be made absolutely clear that there is no admission of orgasm!,” an immortal line she delivers with admirable conviction. 

Out of fairness, after the defense is done presenting its irrelevant evidence, the judge allows the prosecution to admit some totally irrelevant evidence of their own by letting Anne Bancroft play Chris Sarandon’s avant-garde version of the “Theme from Space Invaders” while she puts him on the stand and makes him contradict himself about 200 times.

In the end, the jury determines that Margaux’s nude photos were nastier than Chris Sarandon’s whale make-out music, so they find him not guilty.  So Margaux packs up a hunting rifle and her kid sister and they head out to live in the country like dirty hippies, but first Margaux has to do just one more photo shoot.  So while she’s twirling around in her red ballroom gown, Mariel gets bored and wanders over next door to the big empty auditorium where Chris Sarandon is having rehearsal for his new show, a laser-light pre-teen girl in leotards Blue Man Group type show featuring his music and starring all the Catholic schoolgirls whose parents didn’t mind leaving them alone with Chris Sarandon unsupervised because after all he’s an acquitted rapist.  He tells the girls to take five when he sees Mariel peeping on the rehearsal, and he calls her to him and after some small talk he pulls down her shirt and starts measuring her heartbeat with this sensor he keeps handy and playing it on the auditorium speakers, beating faster and faster as he asks her whether she really believes he raped her sister.  After Mariel’s terrified herself enough, she finally decides to run away and Chris Sarandon chases her through all the hallways and empty tunnels until he catches her somewhere in the sewer and… well, Dino wanted to remind us that he’s sexually depraved, just in case we had forgot because he hadn’t raped anyone in nearly an hour. 

When Margaux finds out about the second rape, she snaps goes and gets her hunting rifle while Chris Sarandon’s casually walking away from the crime scene.  Fortunately for Marguax, he gets detained by a grateful nun, and catches a case of fumble fingers when he’s trying to unlock his car.  But he gets in and starts casually driving away, so at this point, we think we’re going to get to see an exciting, rubber-squealing chase scene through the streets of LA as Margaux leans out the window, steering with one hand firing with the other.  But this is a socially relevant movie, not some cheesy exploitation flick, so instead Margaux just puts a couple of rounds through the windshield of his Pontiac until he crashes it up against the parking lot curb, then puts four or five rounds in him when he climbs out of the wreck.  She never musses up her makeup or formalwear or blank expression during the entire vigilante-style execution. 

The end.  Marguax Hemmingway didn’t work again for three years, until she landed a plum role as piranha bait opposite Lee Majors and Karen Black in KILLER FISH (1979).

This movie is a stunning indictment of the evil unscrupulous men do.  Like trick unprepared fashion models with famous grandparents into starting their movie careers with a role that would have challenged Jodie Foster.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2008, 04:29:08 PM by Rev. Powell » Logged

I'll take you places the hand of man has not yet set foot...
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