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"Diary of a Canibbal"
DVD
Well, folks, you've
walked into a real doozy this week. You've walked into the midst
of me about to unchain a mass of hyperbole the likes of which
you have not seen from me, at least not since the last time I
took on a movie from the new German wonder of the godawful movie
realm. No, not Uwe Boll--but rather a man so reprehensible, so
vile, and so utterly unworthy of a budget to make films that he
is now the new topper of my personal video store shit list: Ulli
Lommel.
And the newest pile
of steaming cinematic crapola brought to us by this crime against
video store patrons, "Diary of a Cannibal", is basically
eighty minutes of flashbacks and assorted revelations on the way
to yield just one central theme. One day, a girl named Noelle
Scanlon killed her boyfriend and ate his heart. At his request.
Yeah.
That's it.
"I killed my boyfriend
and ate his organs because he really, really wanted me to."
And this is an eighty
minute movie.
Is anyone actually
watching Ulli Lommel's ridiculous torture-porn fantasies any more
besides us poor bastard critics whose job it is to tear hell out
of this asshole's work every time he puts up yet another waste
of DVD plastic on our shelves? I hope not. Earnestly. I hope that
everyone who pokes their browser and points it in my direction
is taking my warnings about a cinematic schlockmeister so unadulteratedly
lousy he would no doubt make even Uwe Boll blush in shame.
All of Ulli Lommel's
classic problems are well in evidence here in "Diary of a
Cannibal". His work is, as a rule, slow in pace, badly disjointed,
continually repetitive, and of course packed with enough pointless
(and often poorly rendered) gore to make any kind of enjoyment
impossible. For some reason, he has also decided to pack his movie
with occasionally accurate Bible quotes, and frankly, starting
off a movie about cannibalism with the quote from Jesus Christ
that goes "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides
in me, and I in him" is a perfect example of the kind of
vaguely blasphemous and utterly juvenile nanner-nanner that Lommel
is constantly chucking at his audience. Perhaps even better is
the inclusion of stock footage of lambs at a slaughterhouse being
visibly torn open and rendered following one of the quotes.
Worse, his dialogue
is purely godawful--upon meeting each other for the first time,
Noelle and future lunch Adam, who had been previously chatting
over the Internet for some undetermined length of time, exchange
the following:
"I'm Adam."
"Hi, Adam. I'm Noelle."
Verbatim.
Wow. What's the matter,
Ulli--lose your German / English phrase book?
But frankly, in this
case, it's almost okay that Lommel can't write dialogue to save
his life. He didn't include very much of it! Entire stretches
will go by without so much as a word spoken; one is forced to
wonder if Lommel was paying his actors by the word and was running
out of money after blowing the five bucks to option that slaughterhouse
footage. Of course, when you've included such opulent sets as
a warehouse and a hospital that looks very much like a warehouse,
you probably didn't have that much cash to begin with.
The ending is a series
of flashbacks to events that did not happen in the film, a beating,
and a series of childhood photos of Noelle and future lunch. Oh,
and apparently, Lommel was so utterly bereft of ways to waste
investors' money that he had to plunder the news to dig this garbage
up--"Diary of a Cannibal" is allegedly based on a true
story.
The special features
include English and Spanish subtitles, a commentary track, and
trailers for "Diary of a Cannibal", "The Lost Room",
"Beneath Still Waters", "Gamebox 1.0", "Rancid",
"Alien Invasion: Arizona" and "Diary of a Cannibal".
All in all, avoid Ulli
Lommel movies. At all costs. They will be utter wastes of money,
not worth even a rental. The sooner we stop watching him, the
sooner he will go away.
Diary
of a Cannibal
zero stars
DVD
Directed by Ulli Lommel
Written by Ulli Lommel
Starring Jillian Swanson, Trevor Parsons, Danielle Petty, Michael
Barbour
Produced by Ulli Lommel
R
82 mins
2007
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