As one looks at the career of Ulli Lommel it’s difficult, however hard one tries, to avoid a sense of decline. From an exalted position in the New German Cinema of the 1970s to a prolonged 21st century coda directing some of the cheapest, most abysmal shot-on-video horror films ever produced, Lommel certainly spanned the available bandwidth when it came to quality. Along the way, however, he directed numerous films that deserve more attention for their compelling moods, interesting themes and off-centre plotting. While his later work may freeze the blood of horror fans for all the wrong reasons, his 1980s horror films are smart, inventive, and worthy of serious attention. Meanwhile, much of his German output between 1971 and 1976 awaits proper exposure in English-speaking territories. Commercially speaking he is best known for his wonderful 1980 horror film The Boogey Man, but there really is so much more to explore in Lommel’s strange and unpredictable career.
Ullrich Manuel Lommel was born on the 21st of December 1944 in Zielenzig, Germany[1], the son of Ludwig Manfred Lommel, a famous radio comedian. Steeped in showbusiness from an early age, he began performing on stage with his father at the age of four and scored his first notable success as an actor while still in his teens. In 1969 he began a fruitful association with the wunderkind of the New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, starring in his first feature Love is Colder Than Death. A string of acting assignments for Fassbinder followed, including Whity, The American Soldier, Beware of a Holy Whore, Effi Briest, Satan’s Brew and Chinese Roulette.
After appearing in Whity in the spring of 1970, and The American Soldier that summer, Lommel was ready to launch his own directing career. The result was Haytabo, a beautiful and hypnotic sci-fi film with metaphysical overtones shot in the winter of 1970/71. Fassbinder was supportive of Lommel’s career decision, agreeing to appear in the film in a small role.
A biochemist (Eddie Constantine) discovers a 19th century manuscript describing the formula of an alleged ‘immortality drug’. The text is incomplete, and the chemist tries without success to find the missing ingredients. A breakthrough arrives in the form of an alien (Hannes Fuchs) who helps the chemist to travel back in time to find the complete manuscript.
Lommel began his second film as director in 1972, but production was abandoned mid-shoot. As he explained in his autobiography:
“Tödlicher Poker was the title of the film, with Götz George in the lead role as a gay police officer who falls in love with a young man (Jeff Roden) but is blackmailed by him and is supposed to become corrupt. However, George tricks him and shoots him dead in cold blood, very calmly, completely professional, like a cop on duty. Michael Ballhaus operated the camera, it was a German-French production and was shot in Berlin. Unfortunately, the co-producer turned out to be a crook and the film had to be interrupted in the middle of filming. The Frenchman simply ran out of money and George wanted his fee. It never arrived and the negative of the film is still in the laboratory today.” [2]
Undeterred, Lommel soon had another iron in the fire. In the summer of 1972, actor Kurt Raab approached Fassbinder with a script he’d written about Fritz Haarmann, a German serial killer whose horrific crimes took place in Hannover between 1918 and 1924. Fassbinder liked the script but declined to direct, feeling it was too explicitly violent for him. Instead, he offered to produce and suggested Lommel as director…
Neighbours of Fritz Haarmann are perturbed by the noises coming from his flat at night, but they keep their complaints to themselves: Haarmann’s ready supply of cheap black-market meat is sufficient to quell their misgivings. One morning the police break into the flat and find Haarmann in bed with a naked teenage boy. He is charged with offences against minors, but avoids prison. Instead, a police inspector offers him a job as an informer, justifying this on the grounds that the force is badly under-funded. Haarmann is taught how to pose as a plain-clothes officer, a role he takes to avidly. After hassling a few drunks, he concentrates on picking up teenage runaways. He offers bed and board in return for sexual favours and tells the boys he will find them work and get them housed. Lots of young men are seen entering Haarmann’s flat, but few seem to leave…
Shot in the city of Gelsenkirchen in October and November 1972, and released theatrically in Germany in 1973, Tenderness of the Wolves is Lommel’s most accomplished and celebrated film. For budgetary reasons he altered the time period of the story to 1945-46, but apart from that the script, written by lead actor Kurt Raab, stays close to the facts. Although the molestation and murder of teenage victims makes for disturbing viewing, Lommel handles the story with a restraint that makes the violence, when it does erupt, all the more horrible. The first explicit scene comes when Haarmann seduces an androgynous teenage pianist, son of a local bigwig. Once alone with his quarry, he bites at his neck, chewing the youth’s spurting jugular. The second explicit attack comes near the end of the film: once again we see Haarmann, his face smeared with blood, eyes glazed with a deep psychopathic gluttony, chewing at a screaming youth’s throat.
Lommel had clearly learned much at Fassbinder’s side. The depiction of love as a power-play between damaged individuals, the focus on social relationships of a compromised or hypocritical nature, and the insistence on socio-economic background, all feel very much of a piece with Fassbinder’s work. Lommel was also able to cast some of Fassbinder’s leading lights: Margit Carstensen, fresh from The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, plays the suspicious neighbour; Ingrid Caven is a society lady with a soft spot for Haarmann; El Hedi Ben Salem (star of Fear Eats the Soul) appears briefly as a sailor selling contraband; and Fassbinder himself turns up as a criminal acquaintance of Haarmann’s. Best of all is Kurt Raab as the killer; urbane, wily, obsequious, pitiful, yet still terrifying, he’s one of the most convincing human monsters of the cinema. Meanwhile, Jürgen Jürges’ striking photography works from a palette of deep shadows, grey-blue stonework and muted earth tones. The film’s parade of shabby apartment blocks, rainy streets and misty industrial areas is magisterially gloomy and atmospheric.
Tenderness of the Wolves was selected as the official German festival entry for the opening night of the Berlin Film Festival, but the audience were far from ready for what Lommel had created. Co-star Jeff Roden recalls, “The screening in front of one thousand spectators in the Zoo-Palast was disrupted by a star critic at the time who started to run amok during the first vampire-related scene and had half the audience behind him in a matter of seconds.” [3] A mass walkout ensued, with hundreds leaving to cries of ’Scandal!’ Luckily none of this had the slightest negative effect at the German box office: the film promptly hit the top three on its release.
Lommel’s next picture was a perverse choice indeed. For reasons known only to himself he took a sudden swerve into Germany’s most trivial and despised film genre, shooting a cheeky sex comedy called Yodelling is No Sin in the spring of 1974:
Two young women become prostitutes, hoping to make some easy money. Realising that unlike the denizens of big cities the men of the Bavarian Alps are starved of women, they head for the foothills and set up shop at a small farm. At first the local dignitaries are outraged, but soon abandon their lofty attitude when they begin to sample the ladies’ charms for themselves…
A vogue for so-called ‘Bavarian softcore’ movies had kicked off in the late 1960s, and by 1974 was giving rise to such lowbrow delights as There’s No Sex Like Snow Sex (Alois Brummer, 1974) and No Sin on the Alpine Pastures (Franz-Josef Gottlieb, 1974). It was quite a departure from the surreal artiness of Haytabo and the horrors of the Fritz Haarmann case. “I did it as a satire, more like a Buñuel movie, that’s what we wanted to do, but later the distributor felt it was easier to sell it as … a Bavarian sex movie,” Lommel later claimed. [4]
Far more serious in intent was Wachtmeister Rahn [‘Sergeant Rahn’], Lommel’s second stab at the abandoned Tödlicher Poker story, shot in Munich in the summer of ’74:
An inner-city police sergeant called Ernst Rahn stumbles on a crime scene during night patrol. After shooting the two criminals he tells colleagues that he fired in self-defence, but when one of them survives Rahn begins to crack up … An extended flashback reveals that the younger thief was Rahn’s lover Johann, whom he’d picked up on a late-night train and taken home with him. Unfortunately for Rahn, when the handsome young hoodlum discovers that his new friend is a cop, he and his associate Walter blackmail the older man into conniving in a series of robberies. During one such botched escapade Rahn is recognised by a fellow officer: afterwards he tries to take his own life. He survives and is sent to a psychiatric facility where he bitterly plots his revenge…
A tragic tale of misery and humiliation starring Hans Zander as the cop, Rainer Will (the first victim in Tenderness of the Wolves) as his lover, and Jeff Roden as Walter, Wachtmeister Rahn was filmed quickly and cheaply without permits on the streets of Munich. It was released theatrically in November 1974, but according to Roden it flopped, and soon disappeared from circulation.
The following year, Lommel essayed a rather more conventional story, a German-Italian co-production called The Second Spring:
An older man marries a beautiful younger woman, intending to settle down and draw a line under his past erotic excesses. However, a chance encounter with an old flame disrupts his plan and he succumbs to the other woman’s charms. His wife becomes vengeful and orchestrates a series of emotional provocations designed to humiliate and punish him.
The Second Spring starred Curd Jürgens, one of the elder statesmen of German cinema, and viewers at the time were shocked by the profane language given to his character. Also grappling with Lommel’s earthy dialogue, as Fox’s friend Antonio, was Umberto Raho, an Italian actor best known to genre fans for his pivotal role as the gallery owner in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. As a piece of filmmaking, Second Spring is sober, restrained and professional, despite the occasionally shocking dialogue and a downbeat theme.
Drinking with Fassbinder one evening in 1976, Lommel pitched an outrageous idea for his next directorial venture: a film about Hitler’s obsession with the actress Marlene Dietrich:
“The private life of Adolf Hitler. With Kurt Raab in the lead role. And you will play Ernst Röhm; Carstensen, Marlene Dietrich; and I, Joseph Göbbels. What do you think of that? Only his private life, not a word about anti-Semitism or the Second World War.”
Lommel described what happened next:
“Fassbinder didn’t think long, he immediately picked up the phone and dialled a number in Germany. ‘I’m sorry to wake you, dear Mr. Eckelkamp, but I’m in Paris right now with Ulli Lommel, whom you know well, because he already made you filthy rich with The Tenderness of Wolves, and now he wants to make a new film about Hitler’s private life. I’m willing to produce it, but we still need about a hundred thousand marks. When can we shoot it?’ Hanns Eckelkamp was the enterprising and successful head of distribution at Atlas Films, which did a lot for German cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. He agreed immediately. ‘All right, Mr. Fassbinder, the idea is excellent and the money is available at any time.’” [5]
Shot in 1976 in 22 days, Adolf and Marlene cost a reported $150,000. Unfortunately, Marlene Dietrich herself was so incensed by the film that she took out an injunction. Consequently it played for just three days in Germany before it was shut down, although it did eventually receive an airing at film festivals in Australia and Canada in the summer of 1977. Very difficult to see today, the film has only circulated among collectors thanks to a poor-quality German-language TV screening.
After Adolf and Marlene, Lommel announced in a Canadian newspaper that his next film would be “Mabuse”, to be shot in France. Sadly, this intriguing project reviving Fritz Lang’s criminal mastermind was abandoned. Instead Lommel returned to comedy with Ausgerechnet Bananen (‘Bananas, of all Things’), filmed in Munich and the Côte d’Azur in 1977. He cast himself in the central role alongside his new girlfriend, the gorgeous and massively talented French star Anna Karina. She and Lommel had met as co-stars on Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette, shot in the summer of 1976. Lommel then charmed her into making this rather tepid comedy, which if nothing else is a testament to his skills of persuasion. The oddball title, drawn from a famous schläger song, is a German expression connoting ‘displeasure at an undesirable event’. Hardly the best augury of success… Ausgerechnet Bananen has little value today, except for the more perverse fans of Anna Karina who may possibly relish seeing the star of Vivre sa vie having her stockings pulled off by a chimp…
A circus ringmaster, his son Max, and a chimpanzee called Johnny struggle to make money with a small travelling funfair. While roaming the Côte D’Azur, Max meets the beautiful Natascha. One day, when Johnny accidentally exposes Natasha’s breasts, the men come up with a new idea: a striptease in which the monkey will help to remove Natasha’s garments. The act is a success, but Max soon begins to resent his ‘love rival’…
New York: Blank Generation and Cocaine Cowboys
By the autumn of 1977, Lommel’s relationship with Anna Karina had broken down. He needed a fresh start, so he packed his bags and flew to New York. In November 1977 he headed for downtown Manhattan to discuss a possible new film project with one of the emerging names in the New York punk scene: Richard Hell.
Billy, a punk rock singer, has just signed a deal with a major record company. Nada, a French TV journalist is making a documentary about him: the two begin a hot-and-cold love affair. When Nada’s German ex-lover, a documentary filmmaker called Hoffritz, arrives in New York hoping to interview Andy Warhol, a love triangle develops. After several knockbacks, Hoffritz finally bags his Warhol interview when the man himself turns up at a TV studio. Initially, as the cameras roll, Warhol sits in silence, but Nada, who’s visiting the studio, draws him into conversation and the interview is a success. With both projects coming to an end, Nada finds herself torn between returning to Europe with Hoffritz or staying in Manhattan with Billy…
Blank Generation was filmed in December 1977 and January 1978, with extra scenes picked up in March ’78 (including nighttime shots of Times Square). It was made under the bland title A Place to Begin but soon gained a better appellation thanks to leading man Richard Hell, whose signature song “Blank Generation” gave the film its final title. Also along for the ride as Nada was beautiful young French actress Carole Bouquet, who’d recently co-starred in Buñuel’s film That Obscure Object of Desire. The notion of a ‘punk film’ attracted lots of attention – at this point only British director Derek Jarman had tackled the burgeoning punk movement in his film Jubilee, shot in the spring and summer of 1977. According to the New York Daily News, a curious visitor from the U.K., Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols, turned up at CBGBs one day to watch the film being shot.[6] As the project took form, Lommel – who also acted in the film as Hoffritz – met the woman who would become his co-writer and leading lady for the next seven years: wealthy Dupont heiress Suzanna Love. She auditioned for Blank Generation, in which she plays a small supporting role, and married Lommel on the 26th of January 1978. It was Love who, in the next few years, would keep Lommel’s shakier productions afloat by writing cheques to fend off collapse.
Another key relationship Lommel forged at this time was with Andy Warhol, who had seen and greatly admired Tenderness of the Wolves. Warhol stayed behind after a New York screening and introduced himself, suggesting that they work together. In a startling promotional coup, Lommel secured Warhol as an actor in both Blank Generation and his next picture Cocaine Cowboys. For the latter film Warhol was a facilitator, making his Montauk beach house available for location shooting and introducing Lommel to producer Tom Sullivan. Warhol’s involvement gained these loose-limbed, slightly shambolic productions plenty of attention in the press and eased Lommel into the New York fast lane. For his part, Warhol evidently liked Lommel: if he had not enjoyed his company on the first film one doubts he would have agreed to act in the second. Perhaps he was even toying with the notion of inducting him as a replacement for director Paul Morrissey, with whom he’d recently ceased working after a string of successful movies. Warhol made his first financial loss on a film in 1977: the ultra-dark comedy Bad, directed by Morrissey’s assistant and sound-man Jed Johnson. Bad, which cost more than all the previous Warhol films combined, sadly flopped at the box office (a shame, because it has a very nihilistic sense of humour that could have chimed with the punk zeitgeist if handled correctly). Warhol, who hated to make a loss, would never direct, produce or ‘present’ another movie again, and Jed Johnson likewise, but one wonders whether Lommel might have slotted rather neatly into the departed Morrissey’s role…
Unfortunately, Blank Generation took a long time to reach the screen. It debuted at the San Diego Film Festival in September 1979, by which time the music scene it attempted to portray had moved on. Nevertheless, the film is a wonderful portal into downtown New York in the heyday of punk, with numerous street scenes catching the gritty grimy ambience of the city, including the iconic CBGB club in the East Village, where so many seminal punk acts played their early gigs.
Cocaine Cowboys was initially shot as “High Tide” although the title changed during the shoot. A woolly, rambling affair, it told the story of a rock star who does a little cocaine smuggling on the side. Tom Sullivan, a wealthy tour manager for major acts like Rod Stewart and Led Zeppelin, produced the film and came up with the concept. He also played the lead, and by all accounts the drug-smuggling aspect of the film was autobiographical.
Reviews for both these films were lukewarm at best, but Warhol himself was happy with Cocaine Cowboys. In his diary for 1 November 1978, he wrote: “Tom Sullivan came by to show Cocaine Cowboys to us on a Betamax. He was smoking marijuana, and it was funny to smell it at the office. Paul Morrissey watched a little of it and said it was too slow, and Brigid was in and out and thought so, too, but I liked it. And I decided I’m not so bad in it. They only let me do one take and I think if I’d been able to do more I would have gotten better. But I was better than in my first film, The Driver’s Seat.” [7]
The Boogey Man
Lommel badly needed a hit if he was to make a success of himself in the USA. Noting that horror films were enjoying a major commercial uptick after John Carpenter’s Halloween, he decided that his next project would eschew the loosey-goosey artiness of Blank Generation and Cocaine Cowboys and instead go for the jugular, American-style. With hard-headed pragmatism he sat down with Suzanna Love and penned a flat-out horror picture: The Boogey Man. (Additional material was added to the script later by the film’s director of photography David Sperling, credited as ‘David Herschel’.)
Principal photography took place in Maryland in October 1979, utilising a farm belonging to Love’s rich relatives. Love took the lead role of Lacey, and her real brother Nicholas played her mute brother in the film. According to Lommel, as soon he finished shooting he loaded the negative into the boot of his car and drove 2600 miles to Los Angeles, making the trip in seven days. “The previous winter in New York was just so cold that I just couldn’t go back to New York to edit this movie,” he explained.[9] Settling at the Tropicana Hotel in L.A., a hang-out for rock stars and junkies, he booked two rooms, one to sleep in and the other to edit the movie. Also staying at the Tropicana, according to Lommel, was renowned writer and ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ William Burroughs, who took an interest in the editing of Boogey Man and hung out in the edit suite watching the process. While assembling the film, Lommel realised that he needed extra material so quickly cast John Carradine as Lacey’s psychiatrist, shooting all Carradine’s material in one very long day. The film was completed by February 1980 for around £320,000, and hit cinemas on the 29th of August 1980.
Released at the height of the horror boom, The Boogey Man proved to be one of the creepiest and most unusual films of the period. It became a huge success financially, reaching the top of Variety’s film chart in the late summer of 1980. By grafting supernatural elements onto the slasher film and delivering a series of tangential, almost surreal digressions, Lommel kept horror audiences on their toes, and if the resulting film felt a little lopsided, a little peculiar, well, even that proved to be a quality audiences could enjoy.
Boogeyman II - Take 1
With a hit under his belt, Lommel found himself very much in demand. On the 16th of November 1980, the San Francisco Examiner ran an interview with him about the success of Boogey Man and revealed that on the day the interview took place, Lommel had been working on a script for a Boogey Man sequel: in fact he told the journalist that photography had already begun: “He promises the death scenes in Boogeyman II – which by press time he was already photographing – will be even more horrendous, more exploitative and, in the final analysis, reap him even greater rewards at the box office.” [10]
According to Lommel, the film that eventually emerged in 1983 as Boogeyman II (or Revenge of the Bogey Man in the U.K.) began life as a sizeable project for Paramount, budgeted at $3million: presumably this was the version Lommel was writing in November 1980. However, the deal went up in flames after he became disillusioned following a meeting with studio heads. So repulsed was Lommel by the corporate mind-set at Paramount that he pulled the plug on the project and walked away. Instead he chose a different story to push forward, working closely with Suzanna Love…
Olivia
The career boost of The Boogey Man sent Lommel down a clearly defined path: from here on he became a genre filmmaker. Between 1979 and 1983 he directed a run of impressive though often under-rated movies, including a downbeat psychosexual thriller (Olivia), a feminist witch tale (The Devonsville Terror) and a psi-fi horror film (BrainWaves). Sadly, due to problems with distribution, and some unwise business decisions on Lommel’s part, these post-Boogey Man films did not find a substantial audience at the time.
Olivia went into pre-production in October 1980 and was ready in time for a Halloween debut screening at the 1981 San Diego Film Festival. However, it didn’t make it onto the wider US film circuit until March 1983, when it opened on four screens in El Paso as A Taste of Sin.[11]
The idea for the film came when Lommel was travelling through Arizona and saw the transplanted London Bridge sitting incongruously by Lake Havasu in the sweltering sunshine. Intrigued by this strange architectural dislocation, he set about writing a story around it. The resulting film was shot partly in London and partly in Arizona, with the moving of the bridge as the central pivot of the story. Location shooting in London took place in Bermondsey: streets such as Shad Thames and Maguire Street were used for travelling shots, while a residential council block at the junction of George Row and Jacob Street stood in for Olivia’s home. A few shots were also grabbed at Flint Scenery, a theatrical construction company located at Bowling Green Place, SE1, and as the old wartime song “Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way” plays on the soundtrack we see Olivia enter The Anchor Tap pub (still there) at 20A Horselydown Lane, near Tower Bridge.
Psychologically, Olivia is strange and disturbing, with an oblique narrative style and an air of melancholy trauma. On a strictly narrative level, however, it’s rather confused. In the London-set prologue we see an American soldier murder a prostitute in her apartment; the crime is secretly witnessed by the woman’s little daughter, Olivia. After a ‘Fifteen Years Later’ caption we see Olivia, now grown up and unhappily married, living near the Thames with a violent chauvinist called Richard (Jeff Winchester). She turns to prostitution and then falls in love with Michael (Robert Walker Jr.), a man she meets while working the street. When her husband finds out, the two men have a night-time punch-up on London Bridge during which Richard falls into the river and disappears. ‘Four Years Later’, a caption tells us, the action moves to the desert town of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where London Bridge now stands. The bridge, by the way, was bought in 1968 by an American tycoon, dismantled, and then rebuilt stone by stone in Arizona, a process completed in 1971. This means that the fight on the bridge back in London must have occurred in 1968 at the latest. ‘Four years later’ takes us to 1972, yet nothing in the art design convinces us that we’re back in the early 1970s!
But if the central conceit is poorly bedded into the timeline, this hardly matters. The bridge’s relocation provides a surreal kick of its own, and the character aspects of the story are seedily compelling: a combination of kitchen-sink realism and spaced-out weirdness. There are even a few echoes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo when Michael sees Olivia, quite by chance, working as a tour guide at the Arizona London Bridge. She’s dressed differently and wears her hair differently, but even at a distance he recognises her. Like The Boogey Man, the film prefers peculiarity to plausibility, which is admirable in a genre too often built around the repetition of familiar tropes.
Boogeyman II - Take 2
In 1981, a year after the nixed Paramount deal, a much smaller production company approached Lommel for a Boogey Man sequel, offering just half a million dollars… and total creative freedom. Lommel, who at this point in his life decided he hated sequels, opted to assuage his annoyance at the prospect by sending the situation up: “Okay. I’m gonna take revenge. I’m gonna play myself, a director who doesn’t want to make a horror movie, and then the boogeyman gets all these people who want me to make a horror movie. So it was a movie about Hollywood, a movie about my own situation.” [12]
Lommel shot the majority of Boogeyman II in 1981 and finished it in 1982 (hence the copyright date at the end). It finally saw the light of day in July 1983, bypassing cinemas and heading straight to home video, which is hardly surprising as it’s a film by turns extremely weird, extremely amateurish, and extremely cynical in its attitude to both the market and audience expectation.
German filmmaker Mickey Lombard is directing a movie called “Nathalie, or The Age of Diminishing Expectations” (although his crass American producer Bernie insists it will be called “Kiss and Tell”). Mickey’s wife Bonnie meets up with an old friend, Lacey, who describes her horrific recent experiences with a haunted mirror (visualised by copious flashbacks to The Boogey Man). Bonnie suggests to Mickey that he make a film of Lacey’s story, but he’s unenthusiastic. Lacey mentions that she still carries with her the final piece of the haunted mirror, which no one must ever touch. Listening in on the conversation is Joseph, Mickey’s chauffeur. He steals the segment of mirror and falls under its spell. Lacey tells the assembled cast and crew the final part of her story (via even more flashbacks to The Boogey Man). Bernie begs Mickey to use Lacey’s experiences as the basis for his next picture, but Mickey remains unconvinced… Meanwhile, various members of the party are being murdered in bizarre supernatural ways…
Boogeyman II feels like a cheap cash-grab. The sheer amount of material spliced in from the first film insults the audience, who are being sold almost half the original movie again. It’s a deliberate kick in the teeth to those who rented Boogeyman II on its release. The opening credits, hand-scribbled on sheets of white paper, suggest either a punkish sensibility or a cheapskate desire to avoid expense. It’s fifty-five minutes before we see a new murder, having already rewatched all the deaths from the first film. Even then, Lommel opts for ridicule, taking the oddball killings of the first movie and lampooning them to the hilt, with death by hedge trimmers, shaving foam, electric toothbrush, wine corkscrew, fire tongs and accidentally swallowed car exhaust pipe. The result is a rather flip and cynical thumbed nose to anyone hoping for a scary movie. If you’re very patient, though, there are a few decent gags. When Bonnie stumbles upon a wooden mannequin in an empty room, she gasps, “I thought it was real.” Bernie raps his knuckles on the dummy’s face and quips, “She used to be – but Hollywood hardened her.” Later, suggesting that Lacey should move to Los Angeles, he promises “All the culture you can take: the Hollywood Bowl, the Universal Tour.” And discussing his German wunderkind, he snipes, “It’s so hard with these European artsy-fartsy directors to get that last ounce of punch.”
Boogeyman II treats horror films, those who make them, and those who want to see them with equal contempt. It’s a film that derides the very idea of its own existence. One almost has to admire Lommel’s willingness to blow a raspberry in the viewer’s face. Sadly, the result lacks the intellectual rigour that would enable him to step outside the shit-show and claim some integrity. The film that Lommel’s avatar Mickey is making in Boogeyman II has a parodically pretentious title – “Nathalie, or The Age of Diminishing Expectations” – so presumably Mickey is being lampooned too, an evasive manoeuvre that means Lommel can avoid having to show us a style of filmmaking we’re not meant to deride. And his attempt to perform a reflexive ouroboros with the material fails because Mickey is not being asked by Bernie to shoot a sequel, he’s being asked to shoot what would, in Mickey’s reality, be the first ‘Boogey Man’ film. Lommel’s indiscriminate attack makes the notion of even that picture something to look down upon: so while pissing on his audience he soaks himself too. It only remains to point out that Lommel must have changed his mind about sequels: see – or rather don’t see – Return of the Boogeyman (1994), Boogeyman II Redux (2002) and Boogeyman: Reincarnation (2016).
BrainWaves aka Shadow of Death
BrainWaves is an attempt to shoot what one might call a ‘classy’ science-fiction thriller, rather in the vein of Coma, which had been a hit in the States in 1978. Told at a sedate and serious pace, with a professional score and some recognisable movie stars in the cast, it’s aiming for an older demographic than The Boogey Man, the sort of audience who might venture into a cinema if they spotted Tony Curtis’s name on the poster.
After being hit by a car in the street, Kaylie falls into a coma. At the hospital she is used as a guinea pig for a new brain procedure: her neurons are overlaid with the neural patterns of a recently deceased woman thought to have died in an accident. Unbeknown to the doctors, however, the deceased had actually been murdered by her lover. Initially the process works, and Kaylie returns to family life, only for her dreams to be flooded with imagery and sense impressions from the dead woman’s life and violent death. When the victim’s lover learns of the procedure and its effects on Kaylie, he comes after her…
BrainWaves was shot during February and March 1982 on a modest but viable budget of around $2.5m, which allowed Lommel to cast name stars such as Keir Dullea, Vera Miles and Tony Curtis alongside Suzanna Love and her brother Nicholas. Beautiful location work in San Francisco adds lustre to the film, with the home of the lead characters located at 1940 Webster Street, in Pacific Heights, San Francisco. BrainWaves opened theatrically on the 19th of November 1982 in Austin, Texas and Newport, Virginia, but while it may have been designed to pull a general audience it was poorly advertised and attracted only lukewarm reviews.
Beginning with a shadowy figure tossing a stereo tape-deck into a bath to electrocute a woman, BrainWaves in its first few minutes feels cut from the same slightly seedy cloth as Olivia. However, it soon settles down into something more conventional. Establishing scenes with the heroine and her family are gentle and characterful, perhaps veering at times towards a ‘TV movie’ vibe but saved by the likeable cast. A road accident involving a San Francisco trolleybus and a passing car is admirably executed, while the scenes of Kaylie recovering from her accident are movingly acted by Suzanna Love and the child actor playing her son. If the film has one major problem it’s a lack of surprise; there are no viable red herrings to make us doubt the villain of the piece, so the thriller element stalls, and the means by which the villain is tracked down in the final reel is based on pure chance, giving the impression of last-minute panic as the scripting deadline approached. Nevertheless, it’s an agreeable way to spend eighty minutes and acts as an aperitif before Lommel’s finest post-Boogey Man film…
The Devonsville Terror
Shot in Wisconsin in September and October of 1982 on a budget of around $165,000, The Devonsville Terror grapples with some serious ideas –– small-town bigotry and close-mindedness, the misogyny of patriarchal religions, conservative mistrust of education, hostility towards feminism and environmentalism –– themes that are even more topical now than they were in the early 1980s.
The film is also distinguished by gorgeous location photography and a strong sense of rural atmosphere. The small Wisconsin settlement of Irma is used for Devonsville, providing many of the exterior locations: Jenny, for instance, disembarks from a bus on the highway just outside the village, and walks down leafy Munro Avenue, past houses that are still recognisable today. St Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Irma is used for the schoolhouse exteriors, while other location shots were picked up in nearby Harrison. Studio filming took place in Gleason, Wisconsin, at a newly constructed studio called The Shooting Ranch belonging to independent director/producer Bill Rebane, best known for his 1977 film The Giant Spider Invasion. Rebane, who provided all the technical requirements for the production, watched closely as Lommel made his movie: after the Devonsville team returned to Los Angeles on the 14th of October, he shot his own quite similar film The Demons of Ludlow in December 1982 (several local cast members appear in both films).
The big name this time round is Donald Pleasence as Doctor Worley. Fresh from Jack Sholder’s Alone in the Dark and Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween 2, he’s every inch the star, and although his scenes were clearly filmed later, back in Los Angeles, he gives the film the benefit of his seasoned gravitas and that remarkable voice. Shots of him using tweezers to pull maggots from a wound in his arm give the film some queasy nightmare imagery, but the real horror comes from the constant undercurrent of misogynist hostility exuded by male residents of the town. The three independent women in the story – schoolteacher Jenny (Suzanna Love), radio DJ Monica (Mary Walden) and environmental scientist Chris (Deanna Haas) – find themselves hemmed in, lusted over, sneered at and harassed by the Devonsville menfolk, and thanks to strong performances all round, a palpable aura of dread develops. Paul Willson in particular does great work with his character, storekeeper Walter Gibbs, whose creepy passive-aggressive romantic overtures towards Jenny become increasingly oppressive and embarrassing. Impressive too are local actors William Dexter and Priscilla Lowe as Ralph and Myrtle Pendleton. Lowe is good as the nervous wife attempting to stand her ground against the dominance of her hostile husband, and Dexter is chillingly plausible as the terse, tight-lipped traditionalist who thinks women should stay at home and mind their mouths. (The two of them also appeared in the aforementioned Demons of Ludlow.)
The Devonsville Terror was initially scheduled for an August ’83 release via Motion Picture Marketing (MPM). This, however, fell through and the film instead opened for the very briefest of ‘runs’ (possibly just two or three days) at the Anco Theatre on 42nd Street, from the 2nd of December 1983. This blink-and-you’ll-miss-it booking, and the appearance of an advert for just one day in the New York Daily News, suggest that the purpose was not so much to launch the film as to satisfy suspicious investors that it really was playing in theatres…
Strangers in Paradise
Shot in July-August 1983 in Pomona, North Upland and San Bernardino, Strangers in Paradise also failed to secure a cinema release and instead went straight to video. But whereas Devonsville hit video stores in 1983, Strangers didn’t turn up until 1986, no doubt because it lacked the commercial heft of the horror genre to recommend it. Instead, it’s an oddball venture that one might call ‘a zany irreverent comedy punk-pop musical’. As such it presents difficulties for anyone allergic to the word ‘zany’ or indeed punk-pop musicals of any sort. The soundtrack is filled to bursting with the sort of irritating, brightly produced junk that passed for ‘new wave’ in ’83, as though the party band in a sorority slasher movie have scored the whole movie. Low-rent Kim Wilde or Hazel O’Connor wannabes vie for attention with an adult cast who have stepped before the camera thinking ‘You want zany? You want crazy? You want over the top? I can do that!’ So if you delight in scenes where a ‘square’ citizen goofily dances along to supposedly ‘cool’ music in a way that’s meant to be funny or – god help us – endearing, this is the film for you. There’s also a twee song-and-dance routine in a hospital that’s about as much fun as cleaning a bedpan, and some dumb songs by Timothy Layman mimicking John Lennon and The Doors. Lommel however was clearly happy with the music, as the band in the film, Moonlight Drive, told the local press in September 1983 that they’d been signed for his next film, “Gods and Giants”. It is with infinite sadness that I report this never came to pass….
Unfortunately, Lommel found himself in hot water during this period, when five of his films – The Boogey Man, Olivia, Brainwaves, Devonsville Terror and Strangers in Paradise – became snarled up in litigation. In June 1985, Variety reported that Lommel had run afoul of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who alleged that Lommel’s CinAmerica company (incorporated in August 1981 and dissolved in November 1984) had issued a false prospectus, misleading investors by overstating revenues and net profits of the films. In 1984, in the midst of this unfortunate mess, Lommel and Love separated; they divorced in 1987.
By 1985 the low-budget horror boom was over, and Lommel, acutely concerned with staying afloat in the cut-throat world of commercial cinema, could see which way the wind was blowing. Adventure films, action films and cop thrillers were the genres that flourished in the mid-to-late 1980s, so Lommel set about carving himself some of the pie, directing cut-price projects that mirrored the trends of the day: a comedy adventure film (Revenge of the Stolen Stars, 1984), a kids sci-fi flick (I.F.O., 1985), a cop thriller (Overkill, 1986), an action film (Warbirds, 1988), a mobsters-vs-mercenaries crime thriller (Cold Heat, 1989), and a heist movie with car chases (The Big Sweat, 1990). The resulting films were cheesy, clichéd, forgettable, riddled with poor performances, and with one exception went straight to video, but at least they meant Lommel could keep working.
In the 2000s, Lommel began shooting his projects on video, and the standard of his work plummeted even lower. Nowadays, sad to say, Ulli Lommel is often mentioned in the context of these later films, and pilloried as the director with one of the lowest average scores on IMDb. Daniel the Magician and Zombie Nation (both 2004) are regularly vilified by appalled commentators, but special opprobrium is reserved for a run of crass and artistically barren serial-killer ‘biopics’ – Zodiac Killer (2005), B.T.K. Killer (2005), Green River Killer (2005), Black Dahlia (2006), Killer Pickton (2006), Son of Sam (2008) and Nightstalker (2009) – which unlike the magnificent Tenderness of the Wolves are grossly inaccurate, abysmally cheap and perhaps worst of all, offensively bland: neither shocking, nor artistically satisfying, nor enlightening about the killers’ psychology. A long way to fall for the man who arrived in the USA with the fair wind of European art-house credibility in his sails…
But a man must do something to put food on the table – so perhaps we should just ignore these later films. Far better to concentrate on Lommel’s standout work of the 1970s and 1980s, when he really was a filmmaker of talent and imagination. Lommel died in Stuttgart in Germany on the 2nd of December 2017, leaving behind a substantial body of work that veers all over the map quality-wise but which contains many gems for the adventurous film viewer. Nothing that happened later can erode the stunning artistic achievement of Tenderness of the Wolves, the eccentric brilliance of The Boogey Man, the melancholy oddness of Olivia, or the gender-political deftness of The Devonsville Terror, and maybe one day Lommel’s obscure German films will make their long overdue English-language debuts on disc. The more quality Lommel we have on our shelves, the better.
Stephen Thrower is a British author whose books include Nightmare USA (a biographical study of American independent horror), Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, and two volumes on the prolific Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco: Murderous Passions and Flowers of Perversion. He contributes to numerous Blu-ray releases in the horror genre, curates The American Horror Project for Arrow, and presents the ongoing video series “In the Land of Franco” for Severin. As a musician he has worked for Derek Jarman (The Angelic Conversation), George Barry (Death Bed), Peter De Rome (Encounter), and Lucile Hadžihalilović (Evolution). His previous contributions to bynwr.com include a deep dive into the swamps with Florida filmmaker Luke Moberly and a study of Texan sexploitation director Dale Berry.
[1] Originally Polish, the town of Sulęcin became part of the German state of Prussia in the 18th century under the Germanized name Zielenzig. After the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the town once again became part of Poland.
[2] From Lommel’s unpublished autobiography Tenderness of the Wolves, excerpted in the Brazilian publication Filmes que libertam a cabeça: R.W. Fassbinder (Jurubeba Productions, 2009, p.57).
[3] Jeff Parc [aka Jeff Roden], from his e-autobiography Jeffs Retro-Filmreise in die Zukunft: Ein Spiel mit dem Feuer, p.104).
[4] Ulli Lommel, Tenderness of the Wolves commentary, Arrow Films, 2015.
[5] From Lommel’s unpublished autobiography Tenderness of the Wolves, excerpted in the Brazilian publication Filmes que libertam a cabeça: R.W. Fassbinder (Jurubeba Productions, 2009, p.62).
[6] “Top of Pop”, Susan Toepfer, reported in the New York Daily News, 29 Jan 1978, Leisure Section, p.21 (online p.213).
[7] The Andy Warhol Diaries, entry for Wednesday November 1, 1978. Penguin Modern Classics, 2010, p.250.
[8] From “Scenes from a Marriage”, interview with Suzanna Love on the 2023 Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray/UHD release of The Boogey Man.
[9] From an interview with Ulli Lommel on the 88 Films Blu-ray, UK.
[10] “I Give Them What They Want”, interview with Lommel by John Stanley, San Francisco Enquirer, 16 November 1980, Datebook Section, p.23 (p.303 online).
[11] For its UK theatrical and video release in 1982 Olivia was called Double Jeopardy. It had a very brief theatrical release in March-April 1983, but screenings were limited: the only ones I’ve been able to find were in Paignton, Bristol, Truro and Nottingham, a very odd scattering indeed! The film then disappeared until 1985 when it played occasional support to another early-1980s video release finding its belated way to the big screen, James Roberson’s The Witch.
[12] From an interview with Ulli Lommel on the 88 Films Blu-ray, UK.
[13] Ulli Lommel, Tenderness of the Wolves commentary, Arrow Films, 2015.