Frank Zagarino dies hard!
Braindead zombies from Brazil!
Simon Rhee's bizarre kung fu epic!
Willy Bogner and Roger Moore stuntfest!
Surreal Russian neo-noir detective epic!
Suddenly out of his (and my) comfort zone, though I'm not really sure there is such a thing when it comes to these movies, Ulli actually hits the Big Apple! Well, at least it seems he went there for a weekend to record some exteriors, probably in between coke-fueled raves. Still, that's a laudable effort from video conman Ulli Lommel (note that I did not call him a con artist. There is no art in his con). Being a Californian myself, my memories of the Son of Sam case were not only hazy because I was very young, but also nearly 3000 miles away. Even so, I remember it was something everyone was talking about and remember my father being incensed that Berkowitz used a dog as a defense. My young mind was blown by the fact that he said he killed people because the neighbor's dog told him to. I never looked at a dog the same way again. What is that dog trying to say to me every time I walked past his fence when coming home from school? The internet says cats are vying for world domination, but you don't know. Dogs could be playing a very clever long game.
David Berkowitz was adopted as an infant by a lower-middle class couple who reversed his first and middle name and gave him their last name. It is reported that he was a troubled youth, but that's a pretty easy thing to say about a boy that grew up to be a serial killer. If he had been a successful banker, I'm pretty sure that "troubled youth" would have been glorified as "scrappy beginnings". According to the psychology experts employed by the authorities, what seems to have turned him rabid is the discovery that he was adopted. After a stint in the army, he managed to find and contacted his birth mother. He learned that she gave him up, possibly due to threats from his biological father, who then left her for another woman. According to these psychologists, this is what turned him into a serial killer. Cranial trauma as a child was also run up the flagpole. This sort of analysis is left-over from the '50s, in which the nuclear family is the flawless ideal and any deviation from which results in violent psychosis, drug use and murder. Personally, I find this just as ludicrous as the stories Berkowitz told the police after he was arrested, which were doozies by any standard. His main excuse was that he was instructed to kill people by his neighbor's black Labrador Retriever named Sam. He also claimed that he was part of a Satanic cult who gave him his marching orders (presumably when Sam was too busy sniffing butts). Some have pointed out the inconsistencies in witness reports, timing and other details that contradict some of Berkowitz's confessions, leading to conjecture that he didn't act alone. On the other hand, he could have been taking credit for crimes that he didn't do, as he really enjoyed being at the center of attention for all the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, we will never really know.
Did I declare Lommel's THE BLACK DAHLIA (2006) to be the worst film ever? I'm beginning to think it was his life's ambition is to prove me wrong with every successive movie. "Oh, you think that was bad, motherfucker? Check this out!" You can hear his voice rising from his grave, too, right? It's not just me. Because of the rampant suck-sess of Ulli Lommel's ZODIAC KILLER (2005) and the box office flop of the solid David Fincher film ZODIAC (2007), what could make Lionsgate happier than a sequel(ish)? Yes, contrary to the normal definitions of sanity and reason, a very small segment of the human population actually wanted Ulli Lommel to make another Zodiac movie. It boggles the mind, but apparently not the off-shore bank account.
If you've had the misfortune to see BOOGEYMAN II (1983), you'd be forgiven to think that in 2007 Ulli Lommel would add even a hint of the first film into his sequel, even if it means inserting footage from the original to pad out the running time. Ha! Continuity is for suckers, man! Yep, this sequel has literally nothing to do with the original, except for the fact that the killer says his name is "Zodiac," as in like "Smith, Zodiac Smith". And for the record, nobody in the movie wears a hoodie, nobody has a glowing eye and San Francisco is not upside-down. Well, not in the movie anyway.
Astonishingly, this outing is set and shot (on what appears to be a cell phone) in San Francisco instead of L.A. as the previous one was! Amazing! Of course, that's where the innovations end and we have another meandering, repetitive, adlibfest. That's actually not true. Now we have a bald guy (Jack Quinn) with zodiac tattoos on the back of his neck, wearing big puffy black gloves, wandering around the streets of SF while a non-stop stream of consciousness internal monologue drones over the audio track with heavy reverb. While he wanders around, thinking stuff unfit for a family newspaper, a waifish young woman (Cassandra Church, who could easily be cast in a Shelly Duval biopic) has nightmare visions of the Zodiac killing his victims. She does this between arguments with her narcissistic boyfriend (Lee Mercer). The arguments... So. Many. Arguments. To be clear, these "visions" are typically in no way differentiated at all from the "style" of rest of the movie. These things just start happening with absolutely no context whatsoever, except sometimes they cut to shots of this Skinny Girl asleep in bed or on the sofa. Just sort of whatever Ulli felt like doing at the time. Don't disrespect his art!Since the real life Zodiac Killer attacked three couples (five of the six were murdered) during his short run in the late '60s, Ulli decides to have his usual non-actors adlib scenes of couples arguing while the killer wanders the streets, thinking his thoughts and making phone calls to an alleged police detective who he only refers to as "Fat Fuck" or "Fat Ass" because Ulli doesn't have the patience to script dialogue, so why even bother with character names? This is practically the entire movie. I'm sure Ulli considered himself an experimental artist, but this is so incredibly lazy, sloppy and bereft of talent that is pretty much unwatchable and at one point, I'm not making this up, it prompted my fight or flight response and took all of my willpower not to eject the DVD and hurl it like a frisbee out of my front door.After more Zodiac wandering and ranting, we finally discover that the Skinny Girl is having dreams about the Zodiac killing people. We find this out because she's having an improv argument with her unsupportive boyfriend which makes Skinny Girl wander around the streets of SF while Zodiac follows her thinking "hey bitch, I love ya face, I love your ass, I love your legs, bitch!" Deciding to get even more "artistic", Ulli has a couple adlib arguing (about going to a family reunion) and intercuts it with Zodiac taunting Fat Fuck on the phone while Skinny Girl has a vision of Zodiac shooting the previously arguing girl. This abruptly leads to Skinny Girl suddenly being in Fat Fuck's tiny room and telling him about her visions, and in response, Fat huffs and puffs on a cigarette, sighs heavily, sucks air through his teeth and manages to mutter things like "I'm confused". Honestly, I have no idea where Ulli finds these people, but this guy (who went on to appear in Lommel's BASELINE KILLER in 2008) can't do improv to save his life. Watching him struggle like a fish on a hook, desperately trying to come up with something to say for several minutes, is pure torture in and of itself.
We eventually get to a scene in which the other worst actor ever is playing a piano, talking in falsetto to an Asian girl about his problematic childhood, while Zodiac muses "I love a steak, medium-rare, but this fuckin' fag piano fag (sic) is gonna have his ass fried. Once I'm done with him, he'll be praying that he never played the piano in the first place." As a break from this grueling lack of talent, we get to see the Skinny Girl taking a street car ride while her internal monologue drones over the soundtrack, followed by yet another arguing couple, more montages of the city, faces, corpses and bridges, all in black-white-green and color.Our (no-longer almost) complete guide to the cinematic adaptations of Howard Phillips Lovecraft! The "Never Got Made" File...