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This movie featured a lot more male nudity and sex with dolls than I’m normally comfortable with in my average film-watching experience.

I’ve only been aware of director Ulli Lommel by his reputation in the horror field as the go-to guy for churning out straight to video ‘true crime’ films, usually only loosely based on any true event.  Dungeon Girl is his newest effort, again based on ‘true events’, those of an Austrian case involving the kidnapping of a young girl named Natascha Kampusch, who was held captive by a man for 8 years.

Schatze Melnick (Wendi Jean Linn) is the eyes through which the ‘story’ unfolds, a girl who in narration (though the actual narration is by Gwen Trevathan) about her life, opening with the fact that she’s 18 years old, and was kidnapped by a man five years earlier.  Her father’s suicide earlier in her life had a huge impact on her and her mother’s relationship, and an Uncle who came into her life briefly after his brother’s death leaves and she’s stuck with her mother and a new stepfather.  There are some implications of sexual abuse her in the form of a montage of a doll being manhandled by male hands, which I suppose was the director’s arty approach to the subject.

She’s kidnapped at age 13 (If my understanding of the timeline is correct) by a man (Gunter Ziegler) who is never named, always referred to by the narrator as ‘my stranger’, who locks her in a closet in what appears to be his attic.  He feeds her from his hand like a dog, and she is eventually brought downstairs and set up in a closet closer to her captor, which has a small window crudely cut into the plaster, so he can look in and check on her at his whim.  She’s emphatic that he always watches her as she does everything, but never touches her.

On the flipside of that, we see him having angry, passionate sex with a child’s doll (!), undressing and manhandling it in much the same way we had allusions of sexual abuse shown to us earlier, so who knows if it’s indeed true that he never touched her.

They spend their time watching each other, there’s more male ass as she watches him shower, he doesn’t seem to mind.  He reads to her from the Bible and she gains more trust as we get flashbacks to her childhood, and the one summer that she was truly happy, spending time with a boy she knew and experiencing the first pangs of puppy love.

There’s several dream sequences in which we see her captor interrogating her about witches, all women are witches, etc. and we see some old fashioned witch-hunt torture and burnings in the local woods.  This is interspersed with more scenes of him working over that damned doll, all of which does little except drive home the fact that the guy doing the kidnapping?  He’s crazy. Thanks for the newsflash, chief.

All of this builds to the inevitable final escape attempt that we know had to happen, otherwise this wouldn’t have been news and made into an awful movie.

The problem is that the movie tells you a lot more than it actually shows you, the narration says that this or that happened, they grow closer, she even finds a father figure in her kidnapper, etc., but none of that is indicated by the actors themselves.  They have little to do besides stare at each other or exchange the occasional word here or there, all the exposition takes place in the narration and it makes for a boring watch when you see zero character development in what is supposed to be a five year period.  The editing of the manic, crazy sequences is pretty lousy as well, it smacks of a student film rather than someone with several movies under their belt.

Dungeon Girl comes to DVD with a director’s commentary, stills gallery and an assortment of red-band trailers for other Lion’s Gate releases.

If you’re a true crime completist, or a fan (I’m sure they exist) of Ulli Lommel, then by all means, give this a look, anyone else should probably pass.

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