Ulli Lommel

Ulli Lommel (born 21 December 1944) is a German actor and film director noted for his many low-budget horror films.

Career

Early Career

Ulli Lommel was born in 1944 in Zielenzig, Oststernberg, Germany (now Sulecin, Lubuskie, Poland). He began his performing career when he was put on stage in 1948 at the age of four by his father, Ludwig Manfred Lommel, a popular traveling performer and radio personality in Weimar Germany. The younger Lommel decided as a teenager that he wanted to pursue acting, but his father did not approve, so he ran away from home at age 16.

He acted in a handful of plays and movies before joining Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the Anti-Theater, an anarchist-inspired theater collective that launched the careers of several prominent German actors including Lommel, Kurt Raab, Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen.

In 1962 Lommel began acting in German films and television productions. He can be seen in the 1964 Russ Meyer movie Fanny Hill, which was considered an "adults only" film at the time.

As Fassbinder moved from theater to films in the 1970s, rapidly becoming one of the leading voices of the German New Wave, Lommel became one of his closest collaborators. He spent 10 years working with Fassbinder, who was legendary for his prodigious output, directing 41 films in 13 years. Lommel not only acted in a number of these movies; he also served as producer, assistant director and production designer, working on 16 films including Satan's Brew, Love Is Colder Than Death, Effi Briest and Chinese Roulette. The full list of his work with Fassbinder is listed below:

Work With Fassbinder

Ulli Lommel worked with Rainer Werner Fassbinder on 16 productions over a period of 10 years.

The most noted of Lommel's acting performances for Fassbinder are:

Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) (for which he won an award for best lead actor at the Berlin Film Festival), Whity (1970) (as actor and producer Lommel won 3 German Film Awards) Beware of the Holy Whore (1971), Effie Briest (1973) (as lead actor Lommel was honored with 4 German Film Awards) and Chinese Roulette(1975).

The Start of Directing Career

In 1971, Lommel directed his first movie, Haytabo, starring Eddie Constantine, who would pop up in Lommel's 1975 film, Second Spring, an adult comedy about a young woman (Irmgard Schönberg) who marries an older man (Curt Jurgens).

In 1973 Fassbinder produced Lommel's third feature, Tenderness of the Wolves, which starred Raab as Fritz Haarmann. It is a common misconception that Haarmann is the serial killer whose crimes inspired Fritz Lang's M. That distinction belongs to Peter Kurten. At the film's premiere on the opening night of the 1973 Berlin Film Festival, nearly three-quarters of the audience members in the packed 1,000-seat theater walked out at the first murder scene. The film received a mixed reception from critics, both in Germany and abroad. But during its initial run Tenderness of the Wolves played for a full year in Paris and London, making it one of the more financially successful movies of the German New Wave. It is now regarded as a cult classic. The movie also won Lommel a best director award at the Berlin Film Festival and played the New York Flm Festival to enormous acclaim. Critic Victor Canby raved about the movie. More recently Tenderness of the Wolves was rated as one of 1000 films that will "change your life" by Time Out

Lommel continued working with Fassbinder and directing his own films. In 1977 he made Adolf & Marlene, a darkly comedic and wildly fictionalized account of Adolf Hitler's private life. In Lommel's movie, Hitler (Raab) has a romantic obsession with Marlene Dietrich (Carstensen), sports a fake mustache that he wears only in public and in private is dominated by Marlene who forces him to crawl around on all fours and chew the carpet like a dog. Adolf & Marlene was shot by Michael Ballhaus, another Fassbinder protégé, who eventually went on to an acclaimed career as a cinematographer. German critics hated Adolf & Marlene, but it received positive reviews outside of Germany and played the Chicago and Montreal Film Festivals. The movie is now considered to be lost.

Coming to America

In 1978 Lommel moved to New York City, where he began working with Andy Warhol, who had seen Tenderness of the Woves and Adolf & Marlene at the 1977 Montreal Film Festival. Warhol famously introduced Lommel to Jackie Kennedy by telling her that he was "the greatest filmmaker in the world today." Afterwards Lommel became part of Warhol's Studio 54 crowd. He still owns original, personally autographed Warhol paintings.

Blank Generation, which features Richard Hell of The Voidoids as well as a cameo by Warhol himself, is considered one of the earliest punk rock films and has achieved a certain cult status. A major subplot in the film involves a journalist (played by Lommel) trying to arrange a meeting with Warhol. The film was given a special edition DVD release in Japan in 2005.

Between spending time with Warhol and hanging out at Studio 54, Lommel shot a little horror movie in 1980 called The Boogeyman. Wanting to avoid a brutally cold New York Winter, Lommel drove across the United States to Los Angeles with the negative of the film in his trunk. The Boogeyman was released on Labor Day 1980 and was a surprise hit, making $10 million upon its release, launching a period during which Lommel made approximately 35 films, an oeuvre that has yet to be described or even completely inventoried. Interestingly Boogeyman was banned as a "video nasty" in the UK further cementing its "cult classic" status.

Many of Lommel's post-Boogeyman films such as Olivia (1983), Brain Waves (1983), The Devonsville Terror (1983) and Boogeyman II (1983) starred his wife at the time, actress Suzanna Love. Love is also credited as a co-writer on many of the films in which she starred. Mixing elements of science fiction, rape revenge, militant feminism and standard horror, these films were thematically far removed from any of the work Lommel had done with Fassbinder. Done on a budget of over $500,000 and starring Vera Miles and Tony Curtis, "Brainwaves" is perhaps the most fondly remembered of these titles.

The Boogeyman had given Lommel an unexpected taste of commercial success, and he was encouraged to make a sequel through mainstream production channels. Lommel directed Boogeyman 2 and found that he hated the Hollywood studio system. One interesting stylistic note about the sequel is the way in which Lommel deliberately re-purposes footage from The Boogeyman to shed new light on the events in the earlier film. In fact Lommel routinely reuses and repurposes footage from his earlier films in ways that comment on his own filmography. For example, footage from Tenderness of the Wolves can be seen in The Boogeyman.

Lommel can also frequently be found acting in his own films.

Genre Hopping

Lommel and Love divorced in 1987 after living and working together for nearly 10 years, and Lommel spent the late 1980s through the late 90s genre-hopping, shooting a steady stream of oddball low-budget pictures in the United States, Europe and even, it is rumored, Hong Kong.

During this period Lommel directed a number of genre pictures that were released straight to video or have never been released at all. These include...

Overkill (1987) is a Yakuza-type police yarn that features a police officer who goes undercover as a male stripper. The movie was released on VHS in 1987 on a small label.
Heaven and Earth (1987) was a Cold War-inspired drama about a 10-year-old girl (Marcie Leeds) whose father sells part of the family farm to the Air Force, so they can build a missile base.
Warbirds (1988) is a thriller about a covert military airstrike that goes wrong, leaving one pilot dead and another in enemy hands.
I Want To Be a Vampire (1989), which features Lommel in two major roles, is a movie about a school devoted to teaching teenagers how to become vampires.
Cold Heat (1989) was an action/thriller that co-starred John Phillip Law, Britt Ekland and Robert Sacchi, an actor known as the "man with Bogart's face."
The Big Sweat (1991) follows an ex-con who has just been released from jail immediately becomes embroiled in a robbery. Like Cold Heat it was a straight-to-video release and featured heavy use of stock footage.
Every Minute is Goodbye (1996), which co-stars Karen Black, is set in a small country town and features Lommel as a butler accused of killing his employer.
Danny and Max (2000) (alternately titled Monkey Rap) is a children's movie starring Reiley McClendon.
September Song (2002) co-stars Lommel as a German composer called to America by his ex-wife, so he can deal with their adult son, who has been committing anti-Semitic hate crimes.

The New Century

Lommel has said the late 90s were for him a period of reflection and withdrawing from the world. For several years he made no movies and instead pursued a spiritual quest, spending time in New Mexico and Arizona. After spending most of his time away from the camera Lommel in 2004 returned to directing movies with a vengeance.

Applying the techniques of low-budget filmmaking, Lommel in 2004 directed Ulli Lommel's Zodiac Killer shot on a prosumer digital video camcorder. The resulting film was released straight to DVD by Lionsgate Films in 2005 after some festival screenings. It was the first in a series of very dark, shot-on-video horror movies.

In 2006 Lommel shot several serial killer flicks back-to-back. These include: Green River Killer, BTK Killer, Killer Pickton, HP Lovecraft The Tomb, Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven and Ulli Lommel's Black Dahlia. All were made during 2005 and were shot on high-definition video and released directly to DVD. Most had sales of at least $1m in 2006.

In 2006 Lommel launched his own production company Hollywood House of Horror. Based in Marina del Rey, Calif., Hollywood House of Horror functions as a production company and mini-studio through which Lommel can cheaply and quickly make his signature low-budget, "reality horror" movies- nearly all of which, after released to DVD, manage to break the top 10 independent DVD rentals in North America.

In late 2006, Lommel announced an ambitious plan to produce more than a dozen feature-length horror films in the span of only 18 months, all of which will be distributed directly to DVD through a partnership with Lionsgate Films. All of which are rumored to cash in on serial killer name recognition and feature glossy cover art.

Serial killers are one of Lommel's favorite subjects, but his "reality horror" movies depart wildly from established fact. He says he frequently uses the basic facts of a case as a departure point to explore social issues that interest him such as the roots of serial killing, the portrayal of violence that is common in Hollywood movies and society's complicity in creating serial killers. Lommel has said that he dislikes slick, entertaining depictions of violence, and that with his horror movies he deliberately strives to make the violence extremely discomfiting and unpalatable for viewers.

In September 2006, it was announced that Lommel planned to release Killer Pickton, a film that closely reflects the real case of Canadian pig farmer Robert Pickton, who was accused of murdering dozens of prostitutes in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. A petition to block the film in Canada gathered 1,200 signatures. The reasons for blocking the film were twofold: the content of the film was said to be "so disturbing, that even mention of it is banned in Canada," but there were also concerns that jurors in Pickton's trial could be influenced by the film. Lommel pulled the film before its planned released and explained his reasons for doing so in an interview with Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. The primary reason was legal, as his attorneys advised that Pickton should be convicted prior to the release of a film with his name on it.

References
Recent Filmography
Angel of Death - Starring Steven Robert Olson, one of Lommel's new superstars, the film is based on the case of "killer nurse" Charles Cullen, who murdered numerous patients that were in his care.

Baseline Killer - This film was prompted by the recent serial killings in Phoenix, Arizona as well as a pair of serial shooters who turned the Southwest into a vast killing ground.

BTK Killer - "Bind, Torture, Kill" was the motto of a sadistic murderer who, after a reign of terror that spanned 30 years, turned out to be a church deacon. Remembering the lessons of growing up in post-Hitler Germany, Lommel has invented a twisted idealistic motive for his protagonist: a profound disgust with mankind's treatment of animals, represented by slaughterhouse footage (an idea borrowed from Fassbinder) and the way he uses animals to torture his victims. This is an awful movie with terrible direction.

City of the Dead (pre-production) - A movie inspired by the mysterious disappearances of more than 400 women near the city of Juarez on the American-Mexican border. In Lommel's interpretation, three serial killers have teamed up to enter the record books as perpetrators of the most heinous series of killings of all time.

Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven - As a child, Lenore was haunted by visions of terror and read only the poems and stories of Poe. Now, as the lead singer in an all-girl punk band, Lenore is victimized by a supernatural killer who murders her friends and colleagues before he turns his evil sights on her. The ghost of Poe visits Lenore in her dreams and offers her a way to escape from the killer.

Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit & The Pendulum (pre-production) - A group of teenagers on their way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas are killed and trapped in purgatory where they are judged and tortured for their sins.

Dungeon Girl - Inspired by a recent case in Austria, a teenage girl is kidnapped from her home and locked in a dungeon where she begins to fall in love with her captor.

Green River Killer - In this portrait of Gary Ridgway, a self-confessed and convicted serial killer with 48 known victims, interview footage of the real Ridgway is melded with the fictional narrative that Lommel has constructed to create a picture of a cold, calculating sociopath. The scenes in which Ridgway picks up prostitutes, threatens them with a gun, rapes and then kills them are the most disturbing portrayals of lustmord since Hitchcock's Frenzy.

HP Lovecraft's The Tomb - Based on a story by the master of outrageous horror, a motley group of innocents wake up to find themselves trapped in a living hell of darkness where they are tortured by an unseen villain. The captives must fight the monstrous "puppet master" who has imprisoned them, but they end up fighting each other as they are pushed over the edge of sanity.

Ulli Lommel's Black Dahlia - In Lommel's politicized look at torture and perversity (begun and completed before Brian De Palma's film of the same name) a rookie cop connects the murder of Elizabeth Short in 1947 to a series of gruesome present-day torture killings. With echoes of the recent scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the trail leads to an abandoned jail where three homicidal maniacs conduct "talent auditions" for a snuff movie.

Ulli Lommel's Zodiac Killer - A young man begins imitating the Zodiac murders, and in the process befriends a well-known author (played by Lommel) who turns out to be the true Zodiac Killer. It turns out that Zodiac belongs to a secret society of black-hooded assassins who are bent on purging society of undesirables. The author-cum-murderer torments, interrogates and finally kills the son of Fritz Haarman, who is represented in flashback from Lommel's Tenderness of the Wolves.

Ulli Lommel's Zombie Nation - Joe Singer, a cop with a chip on his shoulder, pulls over speeders and jaywalkers, but instead of handing out tickets to the offenders, he kills them out of some kind of childhood trauma. His fifth victim is protected by voodoo and retuns with the other 4 victims as zombies who take out their revenge. Unlike the other features in the series, Zombie Nation was photographed on 35mm.
External Links
Ulli Lommel at IMDb

Hollywood House of Horror
Published Articles
"Video Watchdog" (USA) April 1998, Iss. 42, pg. 26+, by: Jeff Frentzen, "The Weird World of Ulli Lommel."

"The Globe and Mail" (Canada) Sept. 19, 2006. by: Robert Matas, "I'm okay with being attacked." An interview with Ulli Lommel about the controversy surrounding his movie Killer Pickton.

"Release Print" (USA), Jan./Feb. 2007, by: Elina Shatkin, "Wolf Among Wolves: The Voluptuous Horror of Ulli Lommel."

"Dark Side Magazine (UK) Issue 125. February. March 2007. by: Calum Waddell. Return of the Boogeyman.