A woman who lost her father years before when he was gunned down in a robbery gone bad, finally tracks down the hood who killed him, only to fall in love with him when he confesses to the crime. After a few days of hanging out together he proposes to her. But his former gang members want to silence the couple & stage a hit where they kill their former friend. The woman is arrested by the police but her lawyer manages to get her released without charge. When he learns that the gang wants to kill her, he takes matters into his own hands.
Ulli Lommel is a German-born director who has made quite a formidable reputation as one of the millennium's worst directors. In his heyday he made some interesting films – the 1970s art-house classic The Tenderness of the Wolves about an infamous German serial killer was featured in Time magazine at one point & Lommel's 1980 feature The Boogeyman was his biggest hit. But once the millennium came, Lommel's films became nothing more than cheap hackwork. Which is a shame for what was an interesting talent. Of his post-millennial works, the only good one (that is, the only one that was semi-watchable) was Zodiac Killer, which was disturbing enough to bypass its inherent cheapness.
Absolute Evil was one of a number of ultra-cheap serial killer-themed DTV films Lommel made with his independent production company & was one of the last films to feature legendary actor David Carradine before his death. The film is typical of many of Lommel's films around this time period with mediocre plotting, awkward dialogue & acting, some traces of Lommel's infamous 'lather, rinse, repeat' style of storytelling (where he would showcase a killing over & over again with little variation to it) & brutal torture scenes but with no gore.
The film has been slammed by almost everybody on the Internet, with attention paid to its flaws. But I have never outrightly hated Lommel's works. Sure, most of his post-millennial works have been frightfully cheap to the point of being overwhelmed by their low budget. Absolute Evil has many of these flaws & is not ever going to be seen as a good film, let alone a minor classic. What it does have is a story of forbidden love between a cheap hood & the daughter of one of his victims, only to find themselves torn apart by the hood's former gang mates. Lommel, for once, makes the film more character driven but he still has a problem with writing dialogue, with many of his characters being unable to talk coherently. Absolute Evil also has a mild brutality with Lommel's staging of a man being tortured by having his head dunked into a full bathtub looking like it was done for real. Christopher Kriesa, an actor who has starred in an awful lot of cheap B-grade action films & thrillers, makes a passable impression here as the lawyer but even he can't make the film work well enough to rate as anything more than disappointingly poor.
Ulli Lommel is a German-born director who has made quite a formidable reputation as one of the millennium's worst directors. In his heyday he made some interesting films – the 1970s art-house classic The Tenderness of the Wolves about an infamous German serial killer was featured in Time magazine at one point & Lommel's 1980 feature The Boogeyman was his biggest hit. But once the millennium came, Lommel's films became nothing more than cheap hackwork. Which is a shame for what was an interesting talent. Of his post-millennial works, the only good one (that is, the only one that was semi-watchable) was Zodiac Killer, which was disturbing enough to bypass its inherent cheapness.
Absolute Evil was one of a number of ultra-cheap serial killer-themed DTV films Lommel made with his independent production company & was one of the last films to feature legendary actor David Carradine before his death. The film is typical of many of Lommel's films around this time period with mediocre plotting, awkward dialogue & acting, some traces of Lommel's infamous 'lather, rinse, repeat' style of storytelling (where he would showcase a killing over & over again with little variation to it) & brutal torture scenes but with no gore.
The film has been slammed by almost everybody on the Internet, with attention paid to its flaws. But I have never outrightly hated Lommel's works. Sure, most of his post-millennial works have been frightfully cheap to the point of being overwhelmed by their low budget. Absolute Evil has many of these flaws & is not ever going to be seen as a good film, let alone a minor classic. What it does have is a story of forbidden love between a cheap hood & the daughter of one of his victims, only to find themselves torn apart by the hood's former gang mates. Lommel, for once, makes the film more character driven but he still has a problem with writing dialogue, with many of his characters being unable to talk coherently. Absolute Evil also has a mild brutality with Lommel's staging of a man being tortured by having his head dunked into a full bathtub looking like it was done for real. Christopher Kriesa, an actor who has starred in an awful lot of cheap B-grade action films & thrillers, makes a passable impression here as the lawyer but even he can't make the film work well enough to rate as anything more than disappointingly poor.
