Berlin Film Review: ‘America: Land of the Freeks’

Ulli Lommel, director and Mc of the gonzo mockumentary “America: Land of the Freeks,” is the sort of scurrilous Euro art scavenger you’d be happy to see a real documentary about.

Born in Germany in 1944, he started off as an actor, becoming part of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s mutating stock company (he was the Godardian gangster at the heart of Fassbinder’s startling 1969 debut feature, “Love Is Colder Than Death”).

He then began to direct his own outsider B-movies, like the Fassbinder-produced serial-killer drama “The Tenderness of Wolves” (1973), the scraggly drug noir “Cocaine Cowboys” (1979), the punk docudrama “Blank Generation” (1980), and “The Boogeyman” (1980), a low-budget ghost story that was enough of a fluke schlock horror hit to foster a couple of sequels.

Lommel became a friend and collaborator of Andy Warhol’s and continued to make films up until this past December, when his death by heart failure provoked headlines like “Ulli Lommel: Cult horror director with lowest

Read full article