Second review. It is discussed there that this is a transition film from RigidEast to Lupus. We too had to guess at the dialogue, but it seemed to us that the girl Monica was calling a suicide or depression hotline rather than her analyst.

In any case, she is certainly abused at home by her parents or guardians. During the entire film, she stands in a phone booth, making steam in the cold with her breath. The cut-in scenes of her treatment at home constitute a catalogue of RGE/Lups themes. We see her as she is being supervised by adults who remain off-camera: during morning PT; cowering naked in a (cold) shower; kneeling painfully on a tray of dried peas; being croppped over a trestle; having her palms cropped; polishing a pile of shoes; scrubbing the floor in her underwear; naked taking a bath; having her temperature taken rectally with an extra-large thermomeetr; made to sleep wrapped in mummy-like cloth; accepting an enema; and the suggestion of a suppository.

The flashbacks include time with a girlfriend trying on her bra, which becomes nude lesbian scenes in bed. She is caught and whipped naked with a rugbeater, developing significant blotched rosy marks.

After she concludes the phone call, she walks home, pausing on and gazing over a bridge, which suggests the depression angle to us. Her "mother" awaits and screams in anger. We assume another session followed for Monica.

This is the first offering from Rigid East since they were take over by Lupus Pictures. And while it immediately confirms that the high technical, production, and story line standards of the former are likely to be maintained, its content does raise the question whether we have lost forever the "rawness" (raw amateurishness in the early productions, and raw female bottoms throughout, right up to the latest artistic "Headmaster" series), which has distinquished Rigid East movies from almost everything else in the genre.

If that is to be the case those who already own, or now purchase, the three existing Headmaster videos, and Fairy Tale,(Rigid East will continue to sell the eighteen videos which they produced over the past five years), will have the satisfaction of possessing "collectors' items" which will be much sought after in the future . With regard to what is to come under Lupus, it is rather worrying that during the take-over period all the most interesting photos (there were hundreds) disappeared from the Rigid East web pages. These, post-takeover, have been tidied up again, and a few of the best shots have been reinstated, but whether the original removal was due to pressure from the Czech authorities, ISP censorship, or a certain prudishness on the part of the new owners remains to be seen.

As Help Line's dialogue is in Czech the non-native viewer should read the detailed story line set out on the Lupus web page, a rather sophisticated, fully illustrated affair constructed by Michael Altair Valasek who appears to be in charge of the company. This introduces the three convincing characters of the movie: the schoolgirl with a waiflike face but a voluptuous young body, who uses a phone box emergency line to consult her psychiatric counsellor on the way home from school; the pony-tailed young male psychiatrist who answers but who would rather be building a more sophisticated practice than is likely with neurotic schoolgirls; and the mother who satisfies her sadistic inclinations by giving her only daughter a very strict, Cinderella-like upbringing.

Half the running time consists of shots of the girl in the telephone box conversing with the psychiatrist sitting at his desk. There she narrates what mother has been doing to her, and shots of those activities are intercut with the telephone conversation. These include nudity in the shower and in the bath, domination, humiliation, anal penetration, lesbianism, beating on the hands and on the bottom, but are necessarily very short, and unfortunately totally non-explicit. For example we see an anal thermometer in place, and later an enema tube, but only in coy side-views, and the insertion and extraction of these implements remains, so far as the movie is concerned, a mystery. Even the lesbian scene consists of no more than two naked girls hugging in bed. Only when the carpet beater is applied to the girl's bare behind do we encounter a few moments of what many viewers will have been waiting for. The individual strokes are not all that severe but they are numerous enough to create, in the end, a very tender bottom which shocks the girl's lesbian friend, although it is unlikely to upset aficionados of these pages.

Perhaps this first offering under Lupus Pictures (which in my copy bore absolutely no credits for studio, director, producer, writer, or actors) is intended as a mild preview fit for "universal release" indicating the subjects which will be tackled more explicitly in the future. It is to be hoped that this will be profitable and that some of the profits will be devoted to existing Rigid East projects such as the Headmaster series, a further twelve episodes of which many of us have been eagerly awaiting.