Risco Dobrado

It's hard to understand the negativity around Olivia. Yes it's completely mis-soled as a flesh and fear stalk and slash, it is in fact a sweet love story about a child escaping her damaged past with a bit of horror, social realism and domestic terror thrown in. Of course compared with Crimes Of Passion or Track 29 is lacks thy the fireworks but there are lots of little moments where the camera lingers on bridge lights or the parrots which Ulli Lommel adds to give it a strange stylish flourish. The cast (apart from Robert Walker) are universally great especially Suzanna Love in the title role, even the bit parts are played with utter sincerity and a fair amount of talent. White of the Eye is a similar film which has a much better reputation but Prozzie (Olivia or Double Jeopardy) has oodles to recommend it, in fact it's almost a precursor to David Lynch's Lost Highway without the surrealism. The only criticism, much like Olivia or Jenny, the film doesn't quite know what, or indeed who, it wants to be.

If you go into this movie believing it to be a horror - as I did - you will be disappointed. It might pass as a thriller, but this is mostly drama, and character study.

15 Years ago, Olivia's mother - a hooker - was killed by one of her customers. Now 20 and married to Richard, Olivia is still haunted by her mother's death. Richard is a bit of a brute, and when he refuses Olivia getting a job, she decides to follow in her mother's footsteps - not to make money, but to avenge her mothers death by killing men who picks her up.

One night she is spotted by Michael Grant, an engineer, while taking pictures of a bridge he is working on. Getting acquainted, Olivia enjoys his sensitivity and they start seeing each other while Richard is at work. Olivia is totally nuts, and I found her annoying at times. The film just gets worse towards the end and without spoilers I guarantee you're not going to like how this plays out.

I found the film slow and uninteresting, so chances are I'm going to forget this in an instant. Not that it would matter...

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.

My review was written in March 1983 after a screening in the Bronx.

Filmed half in London and half in Arizona in 1981 with the shooting title "Faces of Fear", "A Taste of Sin" is an effective psychological horror thriller from prolific Germany-to-U;S. Filmmaker Uli Lommel. Biggest treat her for film buffs and horror fans is Lommel's equal-time raiding of not merely the works of Alfred Hitchcock, but also the Hitchcock-derived thrillers of Brian DePalma.

Prior to its present (tacked-on to suit a sex-themed ad campaign) moniker, picture bore a series of better titles: "Beyond the Bridge", "Double Jeopardy" and "Olivia".

Opening (culled from Hitchcock's "Marnie") has 6-year-old Olivia (Amy Robinson) watching (through a keyhole) her British prostitute mother servicing a G. I. who's into bondage. She helplessly sees her mom killed by the G. I. Fifteen years later, Olivia (played as an adult by Suzanna Love, star of all even of Lommel's U. S.-made pics) has a British husband Richard (Jeff Winchester), and dresses up at night to relive her mom's experience as a streetwalker near London Bridge. Controlled by her (imagined) mom's voice from beyond the grave, she starts killing her customers while being wracked with guilt for not coming to mom's aid versus the G. I. Olivia falls in love with Michael Grant (Robert Walker), an American working on a project to restore the bridge. In a fight with Richard over her that takes place on the bridge, Grant is victorious, and Richard ends up hurtling into the water below.

With the film half over, scene shifts to Arizona four years later where London Bridge has been transplanted (along with its fatalistic associations for the lead characters). Grant finds Olivia working as a condominium saleslady using a new name (Jenny) and with a new mousy appearance and American accent. Suspenseful plot twists (and red herrings) involve lifts from "Vertigo", "Obsession", "Sisters","Psycho" -you name it.

Though this type of derivative filmmaking is hotgly criticized these dys (with DePalma perhaps the number one whipping boy), Lommel plays it straight and comes up with an entertaining B picture. He obviously enjoys the Hitchcock association, even casting Vera Miles from "Psycho" in his next film "Brainwave" (opposite Tony Curtis instead of Janet Leigh) and recalling Walker (son of "Strangers on a Train" namesake and near lookalike) for the lead in "Devonsville Terror".

Suzanna Love is quite impressive in the chameleon lead role, calling for at least three distinct personalities. Walker, still looking boyish at age 40, is an empathetic hero, though one keeps expecting him to become sinister, given Hitchcok's switcheroo casting of his dad 30 years earlier. Joel Goldsmith's synthesizer music score is effective, but the film is hampered by drab would-be film noir visuals, for which five cinematographers are credited.

Somehow one is reminded of Brian de Palmas film "Obsession" when watching this rarely seen German-American production from the early eighties. Ulli Lommel, once member of Rainer Werner Fassbinders highly intellectual actors group, turned to directing when he still under Fassbinders influence, but after his mentors untimely death he finally turned to more commercial topics. "Olivia" – or "A Taste of Sin", as it is apparently also known – at first sight looks like pure (S)Exploitation, but there's more to it. As Lommel says in the short interview that accompanies the films' German DVD release, the idea of the story came to his mind when he, while on a trip with his then-wife Suzanna Love (playing the main part), found out that the London Bridge was rebuild in Arizona. He used this as the outline for a sort of identity-switch trouble-personality killer-love story – combining two places with two personalities, both of which essentially having been one from the very beginning. True, the way the story unfolds is far from cinematic brilliance, but nonetheless it is quite entertaining; and in no one way is this modern fairytale the brutal splatter film that others would probably want it to be. There are some harsh effects, and a few violent scenes are included in the aforementioned DVD as bonus (yet only the material that was originally cut out is seen, which makes some of this bonus shorter than even a second!). But sex, murder and blood, while still important for the outline, are not the main attractions. Lommel intensely tries to give his film a psychological touch. Because of his limited skills in storytelling, he does not succeed. But still: Olivias rite of passage makes for entertaining viewing, especially is you like that particular touch of weirdness, absurdity and "otherness" that so many great underground pictures from the 70s carry.