Olivia

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...

Variously known as, Olivia, A Taste of Sin, Prozzie and Double Jeopardy, this has as many twists and turns as it does titles. Eccentric ex art house director Ulli Lommel, writes, directs and even looks after camerawork here in a very strange film. Seemingly considered by the makers as 'Hitchcockian' there is only one decent scene of suspense and lots more that appear to have crept in from many and varied a genre. As so often with low budget fare the bonus is that you never quite know where things might go, but who expects the evil child, slasher, sexploitation movie to tell the story of the moving of London Bridge to Arizona?! Likeable, varied, ludicrous but involving with Suzanna Love helping enormously in a most convincing central role. Crazy, but cool.

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.

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.

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.