As a child, Olivia witnesses the brutal murder of her prostitute mother by a client; fifteen years later, she is in an abusive marriage, and, suffering from schizophrenia, hears her dead mother's voice instructing her to become a hooker. Olivia (Suzanna Love) kills her first customer, but falls for American engineer Mike Grant (Robert Walker Jr.), who treats her with kindness and compassion.
When Olivia's husband Richard (Jeff Winchester) catches his wife in a passionate clinch with Mike, he attacks the engineer, but accidentally falls from London Bridge into the Thames during the altercation, after which Olivia disappears into the night.
Four years later, Mike is working at Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where London Bridge has been reconstructed. There, he bumps into a condo saleswoman called Jenny, who he recognises as Olivia. They rekindle their love affair, unaware that Richard is still alive, and has tracked Olivia to her new home in the desert.
Theories abound about the exact meaning of the nursery rhyme 'London Bridge is Falling Down', an enduring playground favourite amongst young children. Ulli Lommel's Olivia (AKA Prozzie AKA Double Jeopardy), which centres around the famous bridge, is also something of a puzzler. I suspect that the director was trying to use the bridge, so out-of-place in Arizona, as a metaphor for Olivia herself - but it's a clumsy conceit that Lommel is unable to make work.
The awkwardness of Lommel's uneven script is compounded by ham-fisted direction, terrible acting, and badly executed scenes of violence, Lommel even resorting to borrowing from his own (utterly diabolical) Bogeyman II, with a ridiculous death-by-electric-toothbrush scene (it didn't work there, and it's just as unbelievably dumb here as well).
An obvious low budget certainly doesn't help matters, the film looking cheap and nasty throughout, but even if Lommel had been able to 'build it up with silver and gold' I doubt if he could have made Olivia anything but another rather forgettable clunker.
