Fassbinder acolyte Ulli Lommel takes on Hitchcock with the erotic thriller OLIVIA, on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Vinegar Syndrome.

Having witnessed the murder of her prostitute mother (Bibbe Hansen) at the hands of a kinky army client (actress Suzanna Love's brother Nichola, JENNIFER 8) when she was a child, now grown-up Londoner Olivia (Suzanna Love, THE BOOGEYMAN) has soured on the fairytales her mother used to read to her when her handsome prince turns out to be working class lout Richard (Jeff Winchester) who forbids her to work. Staring out her window every night, she observes the prostitutes around London Bridge and her mother's voice tells her convinces her to take on a second identity and explore her mother's sadistic proclivities as a lady of the night. After murdering her first client seemingly to avenge her mother's murder, Olivia falls in love with kind American Mike (Robert Walker, THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR) who is in town to do a report on the financial feasibility of restoring the bridge. Their happiness is cut short, however, when Richard discovers them and a struggle sends Richard into the Thames and Olivia running into the night. Four years later in Arizona where the bridge has been transported brick by brick and re-erected over Lake Havasu, Richard sights below a tour guide named Jenny who resembles Olivia and pursues her, but he is not the only one...

Director Ulli Lommel's better known horror films THE BOOGEYMAN and THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR both had a psychosexual edge to their repressed horrors, and it would be easy to label OLIVIA as a seedy, low-budget take on VERTIGO constructed around the reconstruction of London Bridge in Lake Havasu in 1971 (a move which also brought the spirit of Jack the Ripper stateside in the 1985 TV movie BRIDGE ACROSS TIME which was later released on home video as TERROR AT LONDON BRIDGE). The short film is neatly divided into two halves, with the London sequences – some brief footage with Love and Walker and a second unit combined with footage shot in the London-like tourist village around the bridge in Arizona and some judicious lighting and camera angles – seeming more languorous even if Olivia and Mike seem to fall in love quickly while the Arizona half feels like it could have done with more screen time. These shortcomings may have been a compromise due to the low budget and the staggered shooting schedule, but the film does manage to work on the level of a fractured adult fairy tale with its early scene of Olivia's mother reading her a version of "Rapunzel" in which the princess is imprisoned not by an old witch but by an evil sorcerer, with Olivia seeing Richard as the prince who will rescue her. There are moments of style including the many expressionistically-lit London scenes and one moment of magic in which the combination of Joel Goldsmith's (LIGHTBLAST) synthesizer score comes together with a zoom out to reveal the London Bridge in Arizona and a cut to Walker suggesting that his life had stopped during Olivia's absence. There is also one particularly absurd bit involving a murder by electric toothbrush (a gag more fitting to Lommel's satiric BOOGEYMAN II in which it was recycled). Lommel's muse Love is as vulnerable and sensual, but Walker (the lookalike son of Farley Granger's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN co-star) is a bit shortchanged by the script since much of the film is told from the POV of its object of mystery and desire rather than her pursuer. The film also points the direction in which Lommel's later little-seen eighties and nineties passion projects Lommel would take while he was still churning out work-for-hire exploitation pics (which were very low budget but still more "filmic" than his 2000-era DTV true crime films like BLACK DAHLIA). Love's love interest in THE BOOGEYMAN Ron James has a small role here as her employer.

Retitled A TASTE OF SIN by distributor Ambassador Films in the United States – and released under that title on video in Canada while it played as DOUBLE JEOPARDY in the UK and Australia – OLIVIA was released under its original title in the U.S. on the VCII label (a sublabel of adult company VCX that also put out THE PROWLER, HAUNTED, MARDI GRAS MASSACRE, and NIGHT OF THE DEMON). While the overseas including the U.K. got a slightly hotter version running just under eighty-five minutes, the American theatrical version ran slightly shorter at eighty-four minutes (reducing the length of two sex scenes) – although strangely, the American VHS releases were uncut – and this was the version that Vipco in Britain put out on VHS as a pre-cert in 1983 as DOUBLE JEOPARDY and rated 18 without cuts in 1993 on VHS and on DVD in 2002 as PROZZIE (British slang for "prostitute"). This is also the version Image Entertainment would put out stateside on DVD in 2003 and the U.K.'s 88 Films on Blu-ray in 2016 on their "Slasher Classics" line, the latter from a 2K scan of "original film materials" and bearing the onscreen title DOUBLE JEOPARDY.

Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is derived from a 4K scan of the original camera negative which featured the trimmed footage. Neither of the HD presentations were as saturated as the DVD when it came to the blue gels – with Vinegar Syndrome's colors looking slightly less so than the 88 – but the mood remains, and the 4K scan offers up more detail when it comes to the seedy art-directed settings, Olivia's cut-rate glamour, and the lived-in faces of Walker and Winchester. The audio elements available to Vinegar Syndrome did not include anything for the trimmed bits, so the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track was augmented with audio from video sources. Goldsmith's score sounds more vibrant here than on DVD, making more of an impression emotionally than before. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.

Image's DVD had an interview with Lommel while 88's Blu-ray had a shorter one conducted in 2016 along with another interview with cinematographer Sperling. Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray includes all new features starting with "Becoming Olivia" (20:07), a very welcome interview with actress Love who suggests that the film was inspired by Lommel's childhood in WWII Poland in the middle of a custody dispute between his actor father and his mother who had an affair with another man. She speaks less of the film than of the experience of making films with Lommel, enjoying it for a time but giving it up when she discovered Lommel was seeing other women. In "Taking on Many Roles" (17:10), writer/assistant director John P. Marsh, now a documentary filmmaker, who had met Lommel and Love through his wife. Since he had already written a couple scripts and plays, Lommel let him write the original concept for BOOGEYMAN II but his backers did not like it. They went to Mexico to scout locations for the film and came back through Arizona where Lommel was inspired by the sight of London Bridge, and Marsh came up with the idea but was not comfortable with the more lurid aspects and was gradually phased out of the production on which he had worked as assistant director and art director as well.