Lipstick

Writer David Rayfiel and director Lamount Johnson are making murky connections between sex, religion, repression and the emotional sterility of avant-garde art. The result is both specious and seductive, a kitschy ode to the pervasive eroticism of contemporary culture. [12 Apr 1976, p.94]

It’s Lifetime. It’s camp. It’s seriously confused, and it should speak directly to drag queens in straight relationships everywhere.

The revelation of Lipstick is another Hemingway, first name Mariel, Margaux's 14-year-old sister, who plays her sister in the film. As the chief witness to the events within the movie, and its ultimate victim, she gives an immensely moving, utterly unaffected performance that shows up everything else as a calculated swindle.

In failing to reveal the model's persona as the materialisation (maintained at some cost to herself) of collective male fantasy, the script underlines its teleplay blandness.

Lipstick has pretensions of being an intelligent treatment of the tragedy of female rape. But by the time it's over, the film has shown its true colors as just another cynical violence exploitationer.

Mean little film that pretends to say something about rape but panders to the cheap exploitation values of bad thriller films.

Lipstick is a nasty little item masquerading as a bold statement on the crime of rape. The statement would seem a little bolder if the movie didn't linger in violent and graphic detail over the rape itself, and then handle the vengeance almost as an afterthought.