Baseline Killer (2006)

• Written and directed by Ulli Lommel
• Starring
  • Victoria Ullman
  • Pia Pownall
  • Jaquelyn Aurora
  • Lauren Carter
  • Jana L. Laurin
• Produced by Ulli Lommel and Nola Roeper

Somehow, despite what seems to be my full-on immersion in the world of underwhelming cinema, I have not only not reviewed an Ulli Lommel film, before, I’ve never even seen one. So this will be a voyage of discovery for all of us. Aren’t we lucky?

Although he started as an actor, the German-born Lommel turned to English-language directing in the ‘70s. His main claim to fame is The Boogeyman (1980), a cult horror starring John Carradine which spawned two sequels (on which Lommel was the uncredited co-director). It shouldn’t be confused (but frequently is) with the 2005 horror flick of the same name, which itself spawned two direct-to-DVD sequels. You will have noticed — and if not, I’m pointing it out to you — that said claim to fame is an unlikely hit three decades in the past, despite the fact that he has directed forty-two films since that time. That would be your first clue that the success of The Boogeyman was a happy accident, a confluence of events that randomly resulted in something akin to quality, rather than evidence of a talented filmmaker.

From 2005 to the present, Lommel has made his living directing more than a dozen serial killer movies. Most of them has been named after a real-life serial killer or his media moniker: B.T.K. Killer (2005), Son of Sam (2008), Nightstalker (2009), etc. If Baseline Killer is any indication, then Lommel’s normal modus operandi is to discard all facts about the case, make up an unrelated piss-poor movie, and blame said piss-pooredness on the movie being “inspired by real events,” despite having discarded all of the facts in the actual events after which the movie is named.

The real “Baseline Killer,” for your information, was so named because of a string of armed robberies, sexual assaults, and murders in Phoenix, the first of which all took place along Baseline Road. The only similarity between that and this movie’s version of those events is that it also takes place along Baseline Road. There is no similarity between the types of killings or the victims, and I’m kind of glad of that; I would hate to think of any real seal-killer victim being immortalized in a movie that sucks so ferociously.

Ladies and gentlemen, the meat.

The setup is this: a bunch of twentysomething women (none of the cast are identified by their role in the closing credits) meet at the retail furniture warehouse one of them owns, after hours, to have an unofficial high school reunion, share a few drinks, talk about the men in their lives, and maybe afterward hit the clubs. Their dialog is natural and ad-libbed, which means it’s as boring and inconsequential as eavesdropping on a real gathering of old high-school galpals you don’t know. This goes on for over ten minutes, so we glean a few things about them, like one is a writer, and one is married, and one is going to be, and blah blah blah-blah blah-blah-blah BLAH blah-blah blah blah. In order to amuse myself during this scene, I wondered why one of the actresses wears such an obvious blonde wig, and why the other characters call attention to it by complimenting her on her platinum-blonde bleach job, when it’s obvious that it’s the wiggiest wig ever wug.

During all of this, the Baseline Killer, whom we’ve seen in a pre-credits scene to be an over-the-hill loser with lank hair and a funny hat, creeps in the back door of the place with a rifle and explores the fuse box. He’s accompanied by his rarely-seen doughboy accomplice who videotapes the proceedings. Note: You will never be able to tell what is supposed to be the videocamera footage after this first scene of them, because the main footage was also shot on digital video with lighting of the “two D-cell” variety and thus looks like crap. He ever-so-slowly wanders around the place, then ascends to the mezzanine, where he has a clear shot at the girls.

He takes roughly five minutes to play with their heads with the laser light on his gun (they think it’s something weird with the security system), then finally — at the 21-minute mark — kills the lights and fires some shots. Several minutes of screaming later, the lights come back on, and Donna, who owns the warehouse, is nowhere to be found. The girls half-suspect that it’s some sort of practical joke, so they slowly wend their way between the furniture, looking for Donna.. until they find her in the employees’ kitchen section, a bullet hole in her head.

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Which means, then, that the Baseline Killer shot her in the dark, then either he or his sidekick unerringly threaded his way through furniture and screaming girls to gather up Donna’s corpse, carried it away without being noticed by said girls, and carted it to the kitchen to set it up in a chair without making a trail of drops of blood from the profusely-bleeding corpse.

And so the girls, after crying and whining and squabbling and moaning, finally decide that they’ve got to find a way out.

And that’s the rest of the movie. Them trying to find the exit. In a retail establishment. With the lights on more than they’re not. Were these characters of average intelligence — hell, were they of Forrest Gump-level intelligence — the movie could be over in three minutes. Instead, we spend the rest of the running time watching them fail at a task that the average white rat could accomplish without breaking a sweat. All while the killer shouts at them from unseen locations, cackling and calling them “bitches and hos.”

Here’s an idea: Why not try following the big ol’ exit sign behind you?

The only thing notable about this movie is how, not content to sit at the nadir of filmmaking skill, it keeps on discovering let another level to sink to and another way to make me regret watching. To wit:

- One girl tries to call for help on her cellphone, but finds that the killer’s already on the line, taunting her. Whah? How is that possible, sort of a supernatural explanation, which is nowhere else in evidence?

- The lights go out again, and another girl gets shot — and before the lights come on again, the killer and/or his sidekick have trussed her up, hanging her corpse from a ceiling beam by her feet like a deer. What can’t they do in the dark?

- The last girl arrives, late, and though the other girls shout for her to hold the locked front door open, she lets it shut, trapping them inside. Wait — so this retail establishment has doors which are locked from the inside, but not from the outside?

- Somehow, the bodies have disappeared when the panicked girls try to tell the newcomer what’s going on. This includes what would have to be pools of blood on the floor — vanished. Why? This serves no purpose except to fill another ten minutes of the movie with the girls trying to convince the newcomer that, no, really, someone is killing them. The newcomer doesn’t believe until finally the killer calls her on her cell phone.

And now, a preview of the upcoming Green Lantern movie…

How does the killer manage to sneak up on them when the lights go out again, when he clearly has a flashlight on the barrel of his rifle?

I could chart the exact moment at which all hope for even an infinitesimal smidgen of quality from this movie was snuffed out. If was when the newcomer said, “We need to arm ourselves, and we need to find a way out of here,” at the 44-minute mark, and the girls promptly all sit down on a sectional couch. Yeah, that’ll do it.

And it keeps getting worse. The newcomer then asks all the girls, “What were you doing before you came here?” and not only are we forced to sit through reminisces of boring everyday activities, but — oh, rapture — we actually have flashback footage, so we can see the girls driving, jogging, talking to their parents, and chatting on the cell phone! (A later scene mirrors this, as girls explain what they want to do when they get out of here, and we’re again treated to footage of what they want to do — things like “make peace with my dad.”)

Almost an hour in, it looks like there might be the late addition of a plot. The killer calls and says that the girls will be safe if they do what he says, and whoever follows his directions best will live. I immediately latched onto this, like a drowning man onto an errant piece of driftwood, thinking that the killer was going to set the girls against each other. But no — the killer never calls back, and the girls forget what he said immediately.

This is the girl who said they should arm themselves. She found a mixing spoon. Let me know how that works for you, ‘kay?

Oh, and the nadir of nadirs: When the lights go out yet again and yet another body is subsequently discovered, one of the girls says, “If I get out of here, I’m going to Washington. And I’m going to kill all the Senators. They’re the ones that create monsters like this.” After this jaw-dropper, there follows a five-minute argument that reduces the nature/nurture debate to something made up on the spot by wanna-be actresses with a digicam pointed at them. (And what’s with giving the House of Representatives a free pass, too?)

To recap: The story just plain isn’t a story; it’s a succession of events, with little logic or rationale between them. I don’t know how much of the narrative was ad-libbed (in addition to most of the dialog), but the whole production seems like the worst videotaped Live-Action Role-Playing session ever — and if there really is a serial-killer-victim LARPer community out there, I’d be much happier not knowing about it.

And the rest of the production settles to the level of the story. The cinematography doesn’t deserve to be called such; the lighting is what you’d expect from high-school dropouts using Mom’s credit card for their camcorder epic, and the best one can say about the camera work is that the auto-focus auto-focuses. The budget is too low for squibs or foam latex; all the shooting wounds have to take place off-camera, and simply consist of pints of blood. The editing feels bipolar, alternately lingering too long on shots that didn’t need to be there in the first place, or jumping and cutting around with no rhyme or rhythm. The “score,” such as it is, is mostly a collection of industrial sounds which makes it almost impossible to tell what’s supposed to be in-scene sound and what’s on the soundtrack.

The entire experience is like being beaten on your frontal lobes with a two-foot length of garden hose; its sole utility in the world is as something Charles Band can point to and say, “At least I’ve never been associated with something that bad!” I know that I’m known for hyperbole, especially in movies that I despise, but I say the following in all seriousness: If I were a director with a thirty-plus-year career, I would eat the business end of a shotgun before I allowed this embarrassing sludge to be distributed with my name on it.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0