Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

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.

German film director Ulli Lommel dedicates this abortive flick to his mentor, the well-regarded Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Though Fassbinder is probably turning somersaults in his grave at the idea of being associated with this cinematic tripe, the dedication is instructive in knowing where Lommel's head is at. Lommel, who has operated out of the US for decades, continually tries to gain some recognition in his own country as a genuine auteur. But the Germans think he is a joke. ABSOLUTE EVIL absolutely will not help his reputation, either, which has bottomed out after he aggressively directed a rash of poor horror movies, such as KILLER NURSE, DUNGEON GIRL, THE TOMB, and GREEN RIVER KILLER.ABSOLUTE EVIL is the work of an artist who has no original ideas and so imitates what he believes will sell -- a bit of horror here, a bit of western "homage" there, and other bits and pieces of ideas from other movies. The film, which looks like every other Lommel movie and is shot on a camcorder -- is a junker of a movie that ka-clumps along in tiresome fashion, made with the conviction of people who possibly had a large mortgage to pay off. The movie may attract you because of David Carradine's presence in an undistinguished cameo role.In this revenge story, a young woman chases down the killers of her car mechanic father with the help of a boyfriend, who may have helped the killers.Lommel also wrote the banal dialog that is painfully under-rehearsed by the actors, and prior to its screening at the Berlin festival, he touted this production as more substantial than the progressively awful wave started in 2004 with ZODIAC KILLER. However, even with a little extra money in the budget, Lommel defaults to his trademark poor camera-work, one-take direction, terrible acting, slow pacing, and disjointed editing. In the style of all Lommel films, footage is repeated ad naseum and to the point of distraction. Worse of all, he gets a lousy performance out of Carradine! What a sad waste this is.

What a pathetic excuse for a film. Ulli Lommel is infamous for his zero-budget slasher flicks, so incompetently made that even Aunt Martha's home movies look like Kurosawa, but with this abomination Lommel really hit rock bottom. The script and dialog is nonsensical and ridiculous and the "photography" doesn't deserve to be called that (just put the camera in a corner on auto setting, push record and pray for the best). Seeing other "reviewers" compare it to Fassbinder is a joke. It is obvious that the persons responsible for this laughable excuse for a movie have absolutely zero clue about film-making, framing, acting, writing, structure or taste. To be avoided at all cost.

Each time new discoveries. Carradine giving A+ performance. Camera work superb. What was this shot on? I heard they used the new RED??? Anyway, great colors, very cool performances by Chris Kriesa and Ulli Lommel as Beauregard and Rick. Carolyn Neff a treat as Savanna, Rusty Joiner (is he the guy who shows off his body in all these men's mags???). Script shines with twists and turns. Only problem I have: The length. It could've gone on for two more hours. Maybe they should turn this plot into a TV-series. Call it "17th Street" or something. I'd sure watch it. Could be as entertaining and different as "Twin Peaks". "Absolute Evil" reminds me of a mixture out of a David Lynch flick and Tarentino. I didn't care much for Lommel's other horror flicks, but this one? Man, what a departure!!! Has anyone seen his 80s films like "Boogeyman" and "brainwaves"? Or "Devonsville Terror"? Check it out, man. Cool stuff. Now as to his recent Lionsgate stuff, I could've done without that. Neither "Son of Sam" nor "Borderline Cult" did it for me.