Tag Archives: Ulli Lommel

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Boogeyman II (dir by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Filmed in 1982 but not released until 1984, Boogeyman II is — as the name implies — the sequel to 1980’s The Boogeyman.

What’s that, you say?  You don’t remember anything about The Boogeyman and you don’t want to take the time to read my review of it?  Well, don’t worry.  It’s not necessary to have seen the original Boogeyman to follow the sequel, largely because the sequel is full of flashbacks to the first film.  Boogeyman II is only 79 minutes long and 30 minutes of that running time is taken up with footage from the first Boogeyman.  Indeed, if you want to see the good parts of Boogeyman without having to deal with any of the filler, I would recommend just watching the first 30 minutes of Boogeyman II.

There is a plot to Boogeyman II, kind of.  Having survived the massacre of her family at the farm, the now-divorced Lacey (played by Suzanna Love, the then-wife of director Ulli Lommel) goes out to California to visit her friends, actress Bonnie (Shannah Hall) and her husband, director Mickey (Lommel).  How is it that Lacey, who was portrayed as being a simple and not particularly worldly farm wife in the first film, happens to be friends with a wealthy actress and director?  It’s never really explained.

Bonnie and Mickey ask Lacey whether or not the people who killed her family were ever caught.  Lacey replies that they can’t be caught because they’re spirits.  Over dinner, Lacey tells Bonnie and Mickey the story of the shattered mirror and the killer whose spirit was trapped in the broken glass.  Bonnie and Mickey listen sympathetically, though they both think that Lacey’s crazy.  (Perhaps they noticed that Lacey’s flashbacks include scenes in which she wasn’t even present.  Or maybe they’re wondering why Lacey would take the time to apparently describe a lengthy, bondage-themed nightmare that she had during the first film.  Or maybe they’re just amazed by the presence of John Carradine in the flashbacks.)  Bonnie and Mickey also think that Lacey’s story would make a great movie!

For some reason, Lacey is still carrying around a piece of the haunted mirror.  This is the mirror that contains the spirit that possessed her during the first film and which killed the majority of her family.  I would throw that piece of the mirror away but I guess Lacey’s more sentimental than I am.  A creepy butler named Joseph (Sholto von Douglas, a rather stiff actor who still had a fascinatingly menacing screen presence) steals the piece of the mirror and soon, Hollywood phonies are dying.

Boogeyman II was directed by the late Ulli Lommel, a German director who got his start as an associate of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s and who eventually came to America, where he hung out with Andy Warhol, directed some documentaries about the American punk scene, and married heiress Suzanna Love.  Love bankrolled Lommel’s early films, including The Boogeyman.  With Lommel, it was always a challenge to figure out how seriously he took any of his films.  In interviews, he would joke about being an exploitation filmmaker while, at the same time, claiming that his films were designed to expose the hypocrisy of American society.  Boogeyman II is full of phony Hollywood types and there’s a scene where Mickey comments that, in America, “exploitation is a genre.”  It’s probably not a coincidence that it’s the servant, Joseph, who uses the mirror to take out the film’s wealthy victims.  The opening credits of Boogeyman II appear to literally be written in magic marker.  Is Lommel mocking expensive Hollywood productions or could Lommel only afford a box of magic markers?  I suppose both could be true.

The best parts of Boogeyman II are the flashback to the first film, which was a genuinely atmospheric horror film with some serious pacing issues.  The rest of Boogeyman II is dull, though you do have to appreciate the sense of ennui that Lommel brings to the proceedings.  Was the ennui intentional?  That’s the mystery of Ulli Lommel.

As for Lommel, he and Love eventually divorced and Lommel ended his career making trashy true crime films that went direct-to-video.  As usual, Lommel claimed that his crime films were meant to be a serious critique of everything that was wrong with America.  Lommel’s true crime films have none of the atmosphere or occasional flashes of wit that distinguished Lommel’s earlier films.  Was Lommel an incompetent director or was he a subversive artist?  Again, both could be true.  Lommel died in 2017, bringing to close an enigmatic career.

October True Crime: D.C. Sniper (dir by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Over a three week period, in 2002, a sniper shot 27 people in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., killing 17 of them.  For that three week period, the nation lived in fear of an unknown evil that was traveling the highways and killing people seemingly at random.  Even though the murders occurred in the area surrounding our nation’s capitol, there was very much a feeling that the sniper could turn up anywhere and at anytime.  There was a lot of speculation about who the sniper was, with many theorizing that it was Al Quaeda while others argued that the killer was just another home-grown serial killer with a grudge.

When John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo were eventually arrested, it turned out that both sides were correct.  Muhammad was an American-bred spree killer, a man who had a grudge against the entire world and who brainwashed a teenage Lee Malvo into serving as his accomplice.  However, Muhammad also turned out to be a terrorist, someone who admired Osama Bin Laden and sympathized with Al Quaeda, even if he never personally had any contact with the group itself.

When Muhammad went on trial for the murders, there was never really any doubt that he would be found guilty and given the death penalty.  There was also little doubt that Ulli Lommel would eventually make a movie about him.

Ulli Lommel was a German director who got his start working with the legendary Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  Lommel starred in several of Fassbinder’s early films and went on to have a successful directorial career in Germany.  Eventually, he came to the U.S., where he married heiress Suzanna Love and hung out with people like Andy Warhol.  In the U.S., Lommel continued to direct.  He was responsible for some of the first documentaries about punk rock.  His film Cocaine Cowboys featured Andy Warhol playing himself.  His horror films, The Boogeyman and the Devonsville Terror, may not have been beloved by critics but they both quickly amassed cult followings.  However, after getting divorced from Love, Lommel seemingly disappeared until he reemerged in the 2000s as a director who specialized in cheap, direct-to-video true crime films.  Lommel directed films about Richard Ramirez, Son of Sam, Gary Ridgway, the Zodiac Killer, and many others.  While most critics dismissed Lommel’s later films as being exploitive trash, Lommel claimed that he was using the serial killer genre as a way to explore and expose the hypocricy of American society.

Myself, I love the idea of a crazy auteur so nothing would make me happier than to be able to declare that there was some sort of overlooked genius to Lommel’s later films.  However, from what I’ve seen of them, I have to say this is a rare case where I find myself agreeing with the critics.  For the most part, Lommel’s later films were trash.  While I have no doubt that Lommel probably was being serious in his belief that his serial killer films had a deeper meaning, the majority of them were cheaply made and dramatically incoherent.

That said, D.C. Sniper actually is one of Lommel’s better serial killer films.  A lot of that is due to the intense and intimidating performance of Ken Foree in the role of John Allen Muhammad.  Foree is credited with co-writing the script and the scenes in which he discusses his resentments while staring straight at the camera are truly frightening and they probably do capture what was going on in Muhammad’s head at the time of the killings.  The scenes between Muhammad and Lee Malvo (played by Tory N. Thompson) also have a creepy feeling of authenticity to them as we watch as Muhammad turns Malvo into a killer.  In the scenes with Thompson, Foree plays Muhammad as being alternatively nurturing and fearsome and again, one gets the feeling that the scenes are probably close to the truth.

That said, it’s still a Lommel film, which means that the budget is low, there’s a lot of meandering shots of people driving from one location to another, and the majority of the film looks like it was filmed on a phone.  When the film isn’t following Muhammad, it’s following an FBI agent (Christopher Kiesa), who is working undercover as a tourist.  The FBI agents wanders around various D.C. monuments and takes pictures.  We hear his voice-over, in which he explains that he’s more worried about his runaway daughter, who is apparently being turned into an “internet slut” by her boyfriend.  At one point, the FBI agent stands at the Potomac River and wonders if George Washington would be considered a terrorist by modern standards.  Lommel himself plays the FBI’s enigmatic partner, a detective known as the Cowboy due to his choice of headgear.  As one point, the Cowboy promises that he will help the FBI agent find his daughter.  The plotline is dropped after that and we don’t hear another word about it, leaving us to wonder why it was even brought up in the first place.

In the end, D.C. Sniper is good Lommel just because regular Lommel is so bad.

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Nightstalker (dir by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 2009 film, Nightstalker, opens with a drifter named Richard Ramirez (Adolph Cortez) lying on his back in what appears to be an alley.  He’s obviously been beaten.  He appears to be only half-conscious.  As he lays there in that filthy alley, we’re treated to several negative-filtered flashbacks of Ramirez shooting people.  This is followed by a series of blurry shot that were apparently filmed by someone driving down a street in Los Angeles.  Discordant music plays on the soundtrack.  If you listen carefully, you can hear someone mumbling in the background but good luck figuring out what they’re actually saying.  This is a low-budge film and sound quality was not a concern.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the unique aesthetic of director Ulli Lommel.  As I wrote in my review of Son of Sam, Lommel started his career as an association of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s before he eventually came to America, got involved in the New York art scene, and made a handful of decent films.  Unfortunately, after he divorced the heiress who was responsible for funding the majority of his early films, Lommel spent the rest of his career making zero-budget, direct-to-video films about serial killers, like Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez.  Lommel always claimed that there was a political subtext to his serial killer films and I don’t doubt that he was being honest.  You have to be sincerely committed to make a film as inept as Nightstalker.  At the same time, it’s not easy to figure out just what exactly it was that Lommel thought he was trying to say.

Nightstalker is undoubtedly one of the worst of Lommel’s serial killer films.  Usually, I try to make sure that all of my reviews include at least 500 words but it’s really difficult to think of much to say about Nightstalker.  The film is frequently out-of-focus.  The sound quality is atrocious.  The actor who plays the Nightstalker comes across more like a male model than a homeless serial killer who was known for having bad teeth and disagreeable odor.  Because there’s already been multiple films and documentaries made about Richard Ramirez, the Lommel version fails to add anything new to the story.  Instead, the film is a collection of scenes of Ramirez aimlessly wandering around Los Angeles, sucking on a lollipop and occasionally flashing back to his abusive El Paso childhood.  The film moves slowly and Ramirez’s inner monologue is vacuous.  The real Ramirez’s thoughts were probably pretty vacuous as well so give Lommel some credit for not trying make the the guy more interesting than he actually was.

Watching the film, you do get the feeling that Lommel was sincrely trying to say something about being on the fringes of society in America.  Lommel’s true crime films often implied that American serial killers were the direct result of American culture and its obsession with violence and wealth.  As I said, I think Lommel did think that he was making an artistic and political statement with these films, in much the same way that Lucio Fulci insisted that The New York Ripper was actually a critique of capitalism.  (Oh, if only Lommel had possessed just an ounce of Fulci’s talent….)  Son of Sam, for instance, actually does have a few moments where Lommel’s hallucinatory approach is somewhat effective.  But Nightstalker shows the limits of Lommel’s zero budget, semi-improvised approach.  It’s a chore to sit through and it’s a shame that, due to the continuing infamy of the mercifully late Richard Ramirez (Netflix aired a documentary about him earlier this year that had him trending on twitter), this is probably one of Lommel’s most-viewed films.  Hell, I watched it.  But I think this is going to be my last Lommel true crime film for a while.

Halloween, after all, is meant to be a joyous time.

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Son of Sam (dir by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh, Ulli Lommel.

Where to even begin?

Born in what is now Poland but what was then Germany, the late Ulli Lommel got his start as a frequent collaborator with the enfant terrible of New Wave German cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  Lommel acted in several of Fassbinder’s films and Fassbinder produced Lommel’s third film as a director, the acclaimed The Tenderness of Wolves.  In the 70s, Lommel relocated to the United States and, after marrying heiress Suzanna Love, he became a prominent part of the New York City art scene.  He hung out with Andy Warhol.  He made films about punk rock.  He directed three films, Cocaine Cowboys, The Boogeyman, and The Devonsville Terror, that proved that he actually did have some talent when it came to taking on thrillers and horror films.

And then, it all pretty much fell apart.  Reportedly, after he and Love divorced, he lost not only his frequent star but also his main financial backer.  Lommel spent the rest of his lengthy career directing zero-budget horror films that were best-known for featuring stock footage that was lifted from his previous films.  Starting in 2005, he started making direct-to-video movies about real-life serial killers.  In interviews, Lommel insisted that his films were not exploitive but that, instead, his serial killer films were meant to offer up a critique of the hypocrisy of American society.  And while it’s easy to roll your eyes at Lommel’s claim, I have no doubt that he was being, in his own way, perfectly sincere.  His serial killer films are famous for not sticking to the facts but they should be even more famous for their emphasis on alienation and loneliness.  All of Lommel’s serial killer films focus on people living on the fringes of society, ignored by those who would rather pretend that they didn’t exist.  Lommel consistently portrayed serial killers as being a symptom of a much bigger disease.

Unfortunately, Lommel made his films with very little money and on a very tight shooting schedule.  Reportedly, Lommel’s philosophy was to almost always only shoot one take.  If someone screwed up a line or if there was a glaring continuity error or if the camera crew briefly appeared in the background, so be it.  Indeed, because Lommel’s later films were so deliberately chaotic and semi-improvised, it was often difficult to tell if a continuity error was actually a mistake or something that Lommel deliberately planned.

Sadly, this led to Ulli Lommel getting a reputation for being one of the worst directors of all time.  That’s not fair, though.  Whatever one might say about his low budgets or his odd style, one cannot deny that Ulli Lommel had a unique vision and that he stuck with it.  That’s more than you can see for most bad directors.  If nothing else, you’ll never mistake a Ulli Lommel film for being the work of any other director.

Take his 2005 film about the Son of Sam.  The film is 80 minutes of David Berkowitz (played by Yogi Joshi) wandering around New York with a confused look on his face.  Whenever he sees anyone, a voice commands him to kill while another voice chants “Son of Sam …. Son of Sam.”  Meanwhile, there are flashforwards to the recently arrested David Berkowitz, meeting with his public defender and subsequently asking a priest (played by Lommel himself) to exorcise the demons from him.  Then there are flashbacks to Berkowitz at some sort of Satanic coven meeting where the high priestess won’t stop laughing.  (In typical Lommel fashion, the high priestess is clad in her underwear while everyone else in the cult is dressed in black.)  Then, there’s another set of flashbacks to Berkowitz talking to an old woman who may or may not be a part of the cult.  Then a dog shows up and gives Berkowitz a meaningful stare.

It’s a mess with no real plot and making it through the entire 80 minutes is a true endurance test.  The film not only screws up the facts behind the murders (i.e., the real-life Berkowitz shot people sitting in cars, the film’s Berkowitz shoots a drug dealer standing in a doorway) but it also buys into Berkowitz’s self-serving claim of having been manipulated by a Satanic cult, a claim that falls apart under scrutiny and common sense but which was still recently presented as fact by a Netflix miniseries.  We’re told that the film is taking place in the 70s, which is good because, despite the presence of one awkward conversation about going to Studio 54, you’d never know it otherwise.

And yet …. there’s an intensity to Lommel’s vision that I have a hard time totally dismissing.  The movie plays out like a fever dream and the visuals are so chaotic and so random and just so weird that it’s hard not to feel that Lommel probably did manage to capture what it was like inside of David Berkowitz’s messed-up head.

Don’t get me wrong.  Son of Sam is not a good film.  It’s a mess and it’s repetitive nature gets boring fairly quickly.  But it’s also hardly the work of the worst director of all time.  Instead, it’s uniquely Lommel.

Horror Scenes That I Love: Smashing The Mirror in The Boogey Man

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ulli Lommel’s 1980 slasher film The Boogey Man is a pretty silly movie but I do like this scene.  The idea of seeing something in the reflection of a mirror that doesn’t appear to actually be in the room is one of my top nightmare fuels.

Plus, after the storms we had last night and the fact that there’s still debris all over the place and just driving from one location to another is kind of a pain in the ass right now, there’s just something satisfying about watching a mirror get destroyed.

Break, baby, break!

 

Film Review: Cocaine Cowboys (dir by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Two million dollars worth of cocaine has gone missing in Long Island and Andy Warhol is on the case!

Believe it or not, that’s actually a fairly accurate summation of this 1979 film.  The film does feature a plot about several people looking for a lot of missing cocaine and Andy Warhol does play himself.  And Andy does discover what happened to the cocaine!  He even leaves behind some helpful Polaroids of the cocaine’s location, all of which he signs, “Good Luck, Andy!”

But, here’s the thing.  This is an 80 minutes film.  Though Andy appears at different moments throughout the film, he really only has less than 10 minutes of screentime.  He spends most of that time lurking around with a camera and muttering the occasional word of wisdom.

What’s goes on during the rest of the movie?  Not much.  While waiting to make it big with his band, Dustin (Tom Sullivan) has been making ends meet by smuggling cocaine.  Even though Dustin and the rest of the band want to get out of the drug business, their manager (Jack Palance … wait, Jack Palance!?) sets up one last score.  Unfortunately, while the cocaine is being flown out to Long Island, it falls out of the plane and lands in the water!  Uh-oh!  The drug dealers want their cocaine.  Jack Palance wants the cocaine.  The band wants to find the cocaine and they’re even willing to ride around to horses to look for it.  Some other people want the cocaine but I’m not sure who they were supposed to be.  Andy Warhol does not want the cocaine.  He just wants to talk about Interview Magazine and take pictures of the band.

Almost everyone wants to find the cocaine but, interestingly enough, they’re all pretty laid back about it.  Sure, the band might spend some time looking but they’re just as likely to be found performing a song.  To be honest, the band’s not that bad.  I went to the University of North Texas, which is famous for its music school, and the band definitely has a UNT sound to it.  They’re good without being so good that you’d ever expect them to become stars.  The band’s best song features Dustin going, “We’re cocaine cowboys,” over and over again.

According to The Warhol Diaries, the film’s star, Tom Sullivan, was a real-life drug dealer.  This movie was his attempt to recreate himself as both a film star and rock star.  It didn’t work.  This was Tom Sullivan’s only film credit and he died two years later, at the age of 23.

So, maybe you’re wondering how Jack Palance and Andy Warhol ended up in this obscure little film.  Well, I don’t know what Palance was doing there and, judging from his performance, he didn’t know either.  Warhol was in the film because 1) it was filmed at his Long Island estate and 2) he was friends with director Ulli Lommel.  Today, Lommel is best known for directing crappy true crime horror films but, at the start of his career, he was a protegé of both Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s and Andy Warhol’s.

(Lommel’s then-wife and financial backer, Suzanna Love, also appears in the film.  Horror fans will immediately recognize her from her starring turns in Lommel’s The Boogeyman and The Devonsville Terror.)

Particularly when compared to Ulli Lommel’s later, better-known films (like the unwatchable Curse of the Zodiac), Cocaine Cowboys isn’t that bad.  It’s pointless but it’s pointless by design.  Everyone in the film is so detached and out-of-it that the film becomes a portrait of ennui.  It’s a film that very much shows the influence of Fassbinder and Warhol, taking a popular genre — in this case, the drug rip-off film — and then tearing away at all of the artifice.  “Really?  The French Connection had a car chase?” the film seems to be saying, “Well, Cocaine Cowboys doesn’t have anything!  Just like real life.”

Of course, that’s not totally true.  Cocaine Cowboys does have something.  It has Andy Warhol solving a mystery and that’s got to be worth something.

Oh my God, Ulli Lommel’s Back and So Is The Boogeyman…

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

PCAS

Apparently, Ulli Lommel is taking a break from making low-budget serial killer biopics to make another sequel to his 1980 film, The Boogeyman!  This sequel will be titled Boogeyman: Reincarnation, which is an improvement over the previous Boogeyman sequel, Revenge of the Boogeyman.

(As a film blogger writing about Ulli Lommel, I am now contractually obligated to point out that Revenge of the Boogeyman was largely made up of flashbacks to the first Boogeyman film.)

Now, here at the Shattered Lens offices, we have a long-running debate going over whether Ulli Lommel or Uwe Boll is the worst director of all time.  Usually, I pick Lommel but let’s give credit where credit is due.  Both The Boogeyman and The Devonsville Terror had plenty of spooky atmosphere.  They certainly were far better than Curse of the Zodiac or any of Lommel’s more recent films.

(As a film blogger writing about Ulli Lommel, I am now contractually obligated to point out that Curse of the Zodiac is the worst film ever made.)

And the trailer for Boogeyman: Reincarnation may not look great but it doesn’t look as bad as most of Lommel’s films.  In fact, I would even say that Boogeyman: Reincarnation looks almost good enough to be mistaken for a Bill Rebane film!

Anyway, here’s the trailer for Boogeyman: Reincarnation, which has no release date but which will probably end up on Netflix at some point in the future.

 

 

Horror Film Review: The Devonsville Terror (dir by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

DevonsvilleTerror

Who is the world’s worst director?

That’s a question that can really lead to lot of conflict.  First off, it’s a deceptively simple question.  The more you think about it, the more you realize how fragile concepts like good and bad truly are.  Some of the greatest films ever made were critical flops.  Some of the films that have been embraced by contemporary critics will definitely be less acclaimed by future viewers.  There’s a lot to take into consideration when it comes to determining whether or not a filmmaker is good, mediocre, or one of the worst of all time.  It’s something that requires a lot of careful thought and consideration and research.

Of course, if you don’t have time for all that, you can just say that the world’s worst director is Ulli Lommel and save yourself the trouble.

This German director has been making movies for longer than I’ve been alive.  He got his start in the early 70s, as an actor who frequently collaborated with the great German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  With Fassbinder as his producer, Lommel made a few surrealistic (and, it should be stated, critically acclaimed) films in Germany and then, in 1977, he moved to the U.S, and became friends with Andy Warhol.  He also married Suzanna Love, an actress who was the heiress to the Standard Oil Fortune and who starred in a handful of Lommel’s early films.

Today, Lommel’s reputation for being the world’s worst director is largely the result of an endless series of low-budget, straight-to-DVD films that he’s made about various real-life serial killers.  I’ve seen quite a few of these movies (and I reviewed Lommel’s Curse of the Zodiac three years ago) and they are truly bad.  Normally, I can find something to love about almost every movie that I watch but Lommel’s serial killer films are beyond terrible.  They’re so bad that they are almost impossible to review.  I mean, how many different ways can you find to say that a movie sucks so much that it will make you question whether Eadweard Muybride should ever have filmed Sallie Gardner at a Gallop in the first place?

But here’s the thing with Ulli Lommel and this what makes it especially so frustrating to see him currently doing a thousand variations on Curse of the Zodiac.  His first two horror films — both of which were filmed in the early 80s and starred Love — are not that bad.  Don’t misunderstand me.  They’re not particularly good but they still feature enough hints of genuine talent and inspiration that you have to wonder just what the Hell happened.

The first (and best known) of Lommel’s horror films was 1980’s The Boogeyman, an incredibly stupid film that still featured some good atmosphere and a few memorable deaths.  Lommel followed The Boogeyman with 1983’s The Devonsville Terror.

The Devonsville Terror may not have the same cult status as The Boogeyman but it’s actually a far more interesting film.  The film opens in the 17th Century.  In the Massachusetts town of Devonsville, three women are executed for being witches.  After the final witch is burned, her spirit appears in the sky and announces that the town is now cursed.

We then jump forward 300 years.  Dr. Warley is researching the Devonsville curse.  By researching, I mean that he continually invites citizens in Devonsville into his office and hypnotizes them, which leads to them having flashbacks to 1683 and those of us in the audience having to continually rewatch the first few minutes of the movie.  The spirit of the witch curses Dr. Warley and soon, he’s having to pull maggots out of his arm.  It doesn’t add up too much but Dr. Warley is played by Donald Pleasence so he’s at least entertaining.

Meanwhile, a new school teacher, Jenny (played by Suzanna Love), has moved into town and she’s teaching the kids to think for themselves and even goes as far as to suggest that God might be a woman!  The town leaders are shocked and more than a few of them start to suspect that she might be a reincarnated witch…

At the same time, a loser named Walter (Paull Wilson) has just murdered his wife and soon finds himself having nightmares where Jenny allows him to drown in a swamp.  “The legend’s true!” Walter shouts in his dream, “You are a witch!”

On top of that, two other liberated women have recently moved into town, which leads to a panic as the townfathers realize that their town — best known for executing three witches — is now home to three feminists!

Of course, it all leads to an attempt to duplicate the executions of 1683.  Heads explode.  Faces melt.  Don’t mess with the witches, y’all.  That’s all I’m saying.

The Devonsville Terror is a huge mess but, much like The Boogeyman, the film has a lot of atmosphere and features a good performance from Suzanna Love.  (As well, just as The Boogeyman features John Carradine not doing much of anything, Devonsville Terror features Donald Pleasence not doing much of anything.)  But the main thing I liked about The Devonsville Terror was its feminist subtext, which is not something you would typically expect to find in a horror film from the early 80s.

You have to ask yourself — how did the director of The Devonsville Terror ends up becoming the guy who directed Curse of the Zodiac and Mondo Americana?  One huge clue is probably found in the fact that Suzanna Love is nowhere to be found in any of Lommel’s later films.  According to the imdb, Lommel and Love divorced in 1987.

With Suzanna Love, Ulli Lommel was an occasionally interesting, if uneven, filmmaker.

Without her, he’s just the guy who directed Curse of the Zodiac.

A Horror Quickie With Lisa Marie: The Curse of the Zodiac (dir. by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Before I left for vacation, I watched a handful of horror films that were available for free on Fearnet.  For the most part, I think I may have overpaid.  But, since I am dedicated to reviewing every film that I see, good or bad, I’ve decided to review these Fearnet films for Halloween here at the Shattered Lens!)

In the past, I have occasionally defended the German director Ulli Lommel against the oft-stated charge that he is the worst director of all time.

“Yes,” I’ll admit, “Lommel is kind of pretentious and a lot of his films can’t overcome the burdens of their low-budget origins.  And no, he can’t director actors.  But, his early films have a certain dream-like quality and The Boogeyman holds up fairly well for what it is.  Plus, consider these two words: Uwe Boll.”

Unfortunately, I’m not sure that even Uwe Boll could have directed a film as bad as Lommel’s 2007 straight-to-DVD film, The Curse of the Zodiac.

The Curse of the Zodiac is one of Lommel’s “true crime” films.  In these films, Lommel claims to tell the “true” stories of American serial killers like BTK, the Son of Sam, and Zodiac.  (In fact, Lommel has directed two unrelated films about the Zodiac killer.)  A while ago, I read an interview with Lommel in which he stated that his serial killer films are about revealing the hypocrisy of puritanical American society.  Maybe they are but they’re also pretty bad and The Curse of the Zodiac is one of the worst of them.

Taking place in the early 1970s (though you’d never guess it from the lack of period detail), The Curse of the Zodiac tells the story of the Zodiac Killer.  In real life, the Zodiac Killer is one of the most intriguing (and nightmare-inducing) serial killers in history.  In the film, he’s just a bald guy who wanders around San Francisco, kills a few random people, and spends almost the entire movie repeating the phrase, “Hey there, fat fuck.”  The fat fuck in question is a writer who is investigating the crime and who is kind of fat.  We never discover the writer’s name or who he is or why he’s investigating the Zodiac or why the Zodiac knows him or …. well, anything.  He’s just a character who shows up every few minutes.  Another character who shows up every few minutes is a psychic who has visions of the Zodiac committing his murders.  The Zodiac refers to her as “hippy chick.”  Neither the writer nor the psychic really do anything that a normal person would do when confronted with a serial killer but then again, Zodiac doesn’t really do anything that a normal serial killer would do when confronted by a writer and a psychic.

What can you really say about a film like The Curse of the Zodiac, beyond that fact that, in the course of 82 minutes, nothing really happens beyond watching three anonymous characters wander around San Francisco.  Lommel doesn’t get one good performance out of his tiny cast, though he does find a lot of excuses to show off some nausea-inducing hand-held camera work.

The best thing that I can say about The Curse of the Zodiac is that it deserves to be seen just as evidence of how bad a bad film can truly be.

Horror Film Review: The Boogeyman (dir. by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, last night, we finally got a proper storm here in Texas and wow, was I happy!  Quite frankly, it’s not October unless you’ve got thunder, lightening, and howling wind.  Of course, I also ended up getting caught out in the middle of it all and ended up getting soaked just from running from my car to the front door of my house.  Seriously, it’s amazing how quickly your life can turn into a wet t-shirt contest.  (Once I got inside, I did what anyone would do and jumped on twitter so I could tell everyone I was soaked.  “OMG, I’m so wet!” I tweeted, with the most innocent of intentions.)   Anyway, as I dried off, I watched The Boogeyman off of Fearnet.  No, I’m not talking about The Boogeyman that starred the oldest son from Seventh Heaven.  No, The Boogeyman I watched is a genuinely weird little artifact from 1980 and it was directed by the infamous Ulli Lommel.

A hybrid of Halloween, the Exorcist, and probably every other horror film that had been released up to 1980, The Boogeyman opens up with siblings Willy and Lacey spying on their mother having sex with her creepy boyfriend who is wearing a nylon stocking over his face.  So, naturally, Willy grabs a butcher knife and stabs the man to death.  This act of violence is reflected in the bedroom mirror and, not surprisingly, this leads to the dead boyfriend’s evil spirit getting trapped in the mirror.  Or maybe it’s just the evil of the act itself.  Or maybe it’s … well, there’s a lot of possibilities and it’s hard not to consider them all because the film considers none of them, beyond the fact that the dead boyfriend is still in the mirror (which, let’s give credit where credit is due, is actually a pretty neat idea for a horror film).

Anyway, we jump forward 20 years and now, the brother and sister have grown up.  They both live on a farm with their judgmental, self-righteous, ballet-hating aunt and uncle.  (Okay, I’m projecting a little here because I have relatives who remind me of both of these characters and I always hated having to spend any time with them over the summer because I always knew they’d be all like, “Look at us, we’re  farm folk, we’re better than you and who needs books or ballet when you got foul-smelling chickens and cows that’ll kick you in the face just because they feel like it…”  Seriously.)  Willy (now played by Nicholas Love) has been mute since the day he brutally butchered his mother’s boyfriend and oddly enough, no one seems to be disturbed by the fact that he’s a murderer.  (“He’s a good boy,” his uncle says at one point, “I just wish he could talk.”)  Lacey (played by Suzanna Love) is married to Jake Scully (Ron James) and they have a son.  Judging from the uniform he’s wearing when he’s first introduced, Jake is apparently some sort of law enforcement guy.  He’s also a total and complete chauvinistic toadsucker who (though it’s never acknowledged in the film) is pretty much responsible for every terrible thing that’s about to happen.

Lacey is suffering from intense nightmares (the nightmare sequence, by the way, is one of the film’s genuinely disturbing moments) and she keeps waking everyone up at night with her screams.  Well, of course, Jake can’t have this because they’re farm folk, after all!  So, Jake has to act like a man about it and chastises Lacey for not suppressing her feelings.  When that doesn’t work, he drags her off to a therapist.  This would seem like a good idea except for the fact that the only therapist in their little rural community appears to be John Carradine.  Carradine grimaces through his three scenes, tells Lacey that she should go back to her childhood home and see that it’s just a normal house despite its history of brutal murder, and then leaves to collect his paycheck.  

Lacey says she doesn’t want to go back to the house where the most Hellish thing ever occurred.  Jake tells her that she’s being silly and that she’s going to go relive the worst event of her life whether she wants to or not.  Seriously, Jake sucks.

So, Jake drags Lacey back to her childhood home.  The house is now inhabited by two teenage sisters and their obnoxious little brother who spends his time running around and screaming, “Boogeyman!” at random.  He’s kind of a brat but don’t worry — he eventually yells “Boogeyman!” one too many times and ends up getting his neck crushed by a falling window.  That scene, by the way, genuinely shocked me because you just don’t expect to see little kids dispatched so graphically.  But he really kinda deserved it, if just to keep him from growing up to be like Jake.

But before the little boy gets killed, we get to watch Lacey and Jake wander through the house.  It turns out that, even though the house has changed owners, the exact same mirror is still hanging in the bedroom.  Lacey looks at the mirror, sees her mother’s dead boyfriend’s reflection, and proceeds to shatter the mirror into a hundred pieces.  Jake replies that she’s being silly and proceeds to put almost all the broken shards of the evil mirror into a paper bag so he can take them back to the farm with him.  Why?  Well, because he’s Jake so anything he does must be right…

Of course, by bringing the mirror to the farm (and then deciding to put it back together — really, Jake?), Jake has also brought the evil spirit of the dead boyfriend with him as well.  Once again, Jake sucks.  Though, in his defense, Lacey was having nightmares and Willy nearly strangled a neighbor girl, before John Carradine even suggested going to the house.  And mom’s dead boyfriend liked to wear a stocking over his head but was he really evil?  After all, he’s the one who ended up getting stabbed to death…well, regardless, now people start dying and eventually a priest has to come up to the house and try to remember the final scene of the Exorcist.  So, thanks a lot, Jake!   

The Boogeyman is one of those odd films that always seems to pop up on TV and hidden away in various DVD horror compilations.  Through no fault of my own, I’ve actually seen it a handful of times and every time, I’ve discovered something else that doesn’t really work.  The last time I watched it, I found myself concentrating on just how unconvincing all the actors (with the exception of Suzanna and Nicholas Love) were.*  Slowly but surely, I found myself growing obsessed with actor Ron James, who played Lacey’s husband with all the style and charisma of a cardboard cut-out.  (Of course, it doesn’t help that James was playing a character who, to put it charitably, is kind of a sexist pig.  “C’mon, Lacey, cheer up!” he says as he forces her to visit the house where the most traumatic event of her childhood occurred.)  Whenever the movie hit one of its many slow spots, I asked myself, “I wonder if Ron James gave up during the first day of shooting or the second?” 

And yet, oddly, this is a film that’s stuck with me.  The film has an effectively Southern gothic atmosphere to it and even the stiff performances and unnatural dialogue help to give the film a certain dream-like atmosphere.  I know quite a few people who argue that Ulli Lommel is the worst director of all time** but he actually comes up with some effectively surreal and disturbing images.  The sight of the dead boyfriend, with a nylon stocking pulled down of her face, suddenly staring at Lacey from the mirror is genuinely frightening, as is Lacey’s nightmare in which she’s bound and gagged by a knife-wielding assailant.  The idea of mirrors storing everything that they witness is an intriguing one and there’s a nicely surreal sequence in which poor, mute Willy paints over every reflective surface he can find.  Whether by intentional design or not, these flashes of genuine fright and oddness are all the more effective because they’re surrounded by such mundane material.  The end result is a film that’s either brilliant or terrible depending on which point you actually start watching it. 

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* Actually, the Loves were pretty bad too.

**By the way, the worst director of all time is Rod “Straw Dogs” Lurie.