Set and shot in Los Angeles (because that's where Lommel lives) and based on "his story" titled "The Nature of Evil" (which a Google search could not find any mention of) this no-budget sucker-bait outing makes the WITCHCRAFT series (1988-2016) look like A-list entertainment.
A douchebag at a rest home is loudly talking on his cellphone about needing to kill off his elderly relative in order to receive an inheritance. Unfortunately for him, she and the orderly (Vladimir Maksic) are right within earshot causing the orderly to frown with disapproval. After work, the orderly spends a long time travelling through L.A. until he finally comes upon an apartment laundry room where the d-bag is washing his clothes. The orderly, Michael Cosnick (who looks like a Mikey to me), takes out a nickel plated .45 and shoots him in the base of his spine. Are you horrified? No? Well, Los Angeles DJ's are! After what I assume is a pleasant night's sleep Mikey awakes to morning radio blaring about how this murder is "reminiscent of the string of killings nearly 30 years ago by the infamous Zodiac, a serial killer who is still at large!" Yep, you shoot a guy doing laundry and the next thing you know, you're branded a serial killer who hasn't been around for 36 years and operated about 400 miles away. I mean, you can understand why people would freak out and claim it is a Zodiac killing when there are only 71 gun-related deaths per month in 2005 Los Angeles. Makes perfect sense. The DJ helpfully goes on to inform Mikey, "you can read more about the Zodiac in Simon Vale's '70s best seller, 'The Hunt for the Zodiac'." I'll give you two guesses who plays Simon Vale, and one of them doesn't count, because it ain't David Hess.Did I say "David Hess"? We jump to a room in which David Hess plays Mel Navokov, a forensic pathologist who is looking at some very real crime scene photos of bodies in various states of dismemberment. The reason we know he is a forensic psychologist the fact that he yells at his presumed friend Simon Vale (Ulli Lommel): "I'm a forensic psychologist, remember!?" So he's going to assess this alleged Zodiac based on pictures of his alleged victims on his laptop? It's almost as if Lommel has no idea what a forensic psychologist actually does. It doesn't take long for Mel to make an assessment: "The guy knew what he was doing... Makes ya puke doesn't it? When I get sick, I get horny!" Simon responds that when he gets lonely, he prays. These guys could kill a party faster than a visit from your parents.Mikey easily finds a copy of Vale's book and we get one of the first, but definitely not the last, monotonous voice-overs reading the personal history of the Zodiac (here referred to as just "Zodiac" as if it is his name). That's right, detailed biographical information about a guy who was never identified. Since Lommel has a budget that starts at zero and counts backwards, he decides to use black and white footage swiped from THE BOOGEYMAN (1980) while the V.O. narrates what Zodiac did as a kid. This resonates with Mikey, for some reason, and in a desperate attempt to give the movie some sort of depth, Lommel has Mikey narrate his rambling thoughts about his desire to kill all the people who don't visit their relatives in the home where he works. Not sure how he's going to find people that haven't actually been to his workplace, but whatever. He also muses "I love old people. They need help." See? He's not a bad guy! Actually I have no idea whether that is Lommel's intent because the dialogue is seemingly adlibbed and barely coherent.We also get long scenes of Mikey, who is apparently able to mimic the handwriting of the Zodiac flawlessly, writing letters to the police claiming to be the original killer. Additionally, we get absurdly boring scenes of Mikey killing people, like a young couple of non-actors who are looking to buy a Mercedes from some random guy in a small garage. Amusingly, the couple are shown getting shot and then shown dead in completely unnatural positions and in a way that their bodies never could have fallen. Yeah, that's me; expecting visual continuity from an Ulli Lommel movie. There is also a subplot that is introduced late in the game about a bunch of guys who sit around a dinner table wearing black hoods who are the "real" Zodiac killer. They have meetings in which they bitch about the new guy trying to take credit for their crimes and who killed which deserving person that week. Again, implying that serial killers are not entirely bad.We get more rambling, stream of consciousness voice overs that culminate with a bizarre scene in which Mikey orders pizza. It is delivered by a girl in a black and white restaurant waitstaff outfit who Mikey just stares at for a while. Then, on the pretext of getting money to pay for the pizza, he gets a canteen filled with an unnamed knockout gas, causing the pizza girl to faint into a comfortable chair. After staring at her even more, he goes to bed and dreams that they are sitting on his bed tickling and wrestling each other. After waking up, he decides not to kill her. Riveting cinema! Lommel strains to make profound statements about how the military (in this case the US Navy, which is bizarrely specific) are state sanctioned killers. Yeah, he's got a point, but it's so tortured that I yearn for the subtlety of Monty Python's Zulu War bit in THE MEANING OF LIFE (1983). Here he thinks that he'll go into the Navy because "they kill for a reason". I'm beginning to think that Ulli doesn't have a point, just a rounded tip. We also get more of Mikey's Jack Handy-esque musings such as: "One thing I miss reading about the Zodiac is his purpose. He doesn't have a purpose." Makes ya think, doesn't it? Also, while stalking a victim, Mikey thinks "He really got on my nerves, so he had to go. If you know what I mean." No idea. He had to go home? To the grocery store? Piano lessons? What?As if all that wasn't boring enough, we have another subplot about Vance meeting up with Mikey. Vance is trying to investigate Mikey while updating his book for a rerelease for which he is being fronted half a million dollars (welcome to Ulli's other fantasy world). It starts with letters, then phone calls, then getting a friend to hack into US Homeland Security computers and track Mikey's cell phone and then requests for dinner dates at French restaurants and invitations back to his place. Yeah, nothing creepy. For all of the stumbling, half improvised, one-take dialogue, this is the part where Lommel seems right at home, delivering his come-on lines so smoothly that you'd think he's had a lot of practice with them. Draw your own conclusions. One of the "best" moments of this squirm-inducing letchery is when Vale gives Mikey an opera DVD and a people-killing knife and gets him back to his place to feed him ice cream and make him watch REVENGE OF THE STOLEN STARS (1986)! Man, this fucker is creepy and evil!