Black Dahlia

I've never been fooled before. This film has the distinguishing characteristic of being the only time I've mistakenly rented the wrong film. The entire budget for this film was put into the cover art and the rest was probably spent on catering donuts to the worst set of actors and the most ridiculous make-up effects I've seen in many many years.

It's a terrible terrible film for the first five minutes. I wouldn't know about the rest because it's simply inexcusable. I don't know how anyone could watch this entire movie unless cheap, stupid gore with broad satanic strokes appeals to them like pornography. And clearly the number of people who would rent the film on its own merits are few enough that cheap, rip-off packaging tactics are required to eke out a few more dollars from an unsuspecting public.

I didn't even get past the credits when I began to have my doubts. Then it got worse. This is basically bottom of the barrel no-budget B-movie. The acting is terrible, and the script is enough to make you cry. Don't bother renting or watching it. This film makes Italian giallo films look professional and slick. The gore is obviously fake, and you begin to wonder about three minutes in whether the director cast his family in it to keep them happy. I suspect he also borrowed their cars for the film. The childish sing-song and the inclusion of "666" in the Black Dahlia mix was cheap too. Nothing about this film looks professional or particularly well thought out. It is cheapness immortalized on celluloid.

I wasn't expecting this to be the caliber of a box office hit but I was hoping it'd be palatable. I watched something like the first 15 minutes and decided it probably wasn't going to get better (it didn't), so I watched the rest of it at 1.5 speed. The photography was unreal, or too real - the outdoor scenes looked like someone just took their video camera outside & took pictures in the alley. In view of the other horrible 'special effects' maybe this was supposed to be special too but it just came across as bad. The only way I could tell it hadn't been filmed by someones personal camera was that the voices were clear in all of the scenes, no extra background noise. In addition to the not-so-special fx the plot couldn't have been worse. It has the same situations that every bad scary movies does where the young innocent walks into a situation that no sane person would enter and then lo & behold...the bad guys are there!!! Totally predictable as well. This movie isn't worth 10 minutes of your time. The ONLY thing that I have anything even remotely good to say anything about was the music soundtrack, an odd mix of swing/Frank Sinatra type songs with some seriously heavy acid rock. If you've read to the end of this review, you've already spent more time on this movie than it's worth. Terrible. Lousy. Bad everything. Really, really horribly done.

It's pretty obvious that Lionsgate only released Ulli Lommel's "Black Dahlia" so that they could cash in on Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia" (much like other recent sound alike ripoffs "War of the Planets", "When a Killer Calls", and "Flight 93"). Like many of those, this hit DVD before the big movie it imitates in the preemptive rip-off tradition started by Roger Corman. In short, people are supposed to see this DVD on the shelf and mistake it for the De Palma movie. Working at a video store I have encountered the intentional confusion these ripoffs create time and time again.

Anyway, let's talk about the movie already. Rather than re-telling the story of the actual Black Dahlia murder there is simply a brief prologue about it complete with a black and white filter and fake film grain over what is obviously low grade video footage. Then the movie drops us in LA of the 21st century (now) where two plain clothes cops make a drug bust. These are supposed to be our heroes. Then we meet the Satan worshiping killers who lure girls to auditions to play the Black Dahlia and then get murdered. In between looking at bodies and drinking with his partner, the younger drug cop, the rookie whose name I can't remember, looks up the original 40s murder online and dreams about it. That's pretty much it.

The killers kill in very long slow boring scenes before leaving body parts for the police. The police investigate, the killers kill some more ad infinitum. The acting sucks all around. All the murder scenes are very slow and boring and each killing is nearly identical the the last. There's also a lot of unnecessary after effects like rewinding and white flashes. Shots of a graveyard and the 40s reenactment are cut into weird places too. Footage is re-used so often I got to thinking they probably only shot an hour of video before beefing it up to 80 minutes in the editing room (and the credits are already rolling by 78 minutes).

Apart from those confused into thinking it's something else, who is this movie really for? It's not for mystery fans because everything is spelled out to the point where you wonder why the police haven't solved it. It's not for action fans because the action is rare and pathetic. It could only be for very patient low-brow perverts and ultra-low-brow gore hounds, and those people could easily find better somewhere else. I've been renting straight to video crap all year and this is the worst movie I've found so far. For your own sake, stay far away.

We were in a hurry at the video store, and thought this was the other Black Dahlia movie (with Josh Hartnett). Shame on us! The production values of a high-school movie made by teenagers who would rather be doing something else HELP to make this the worst movie ever made. The plot is worse than a bad (not that there's any other kind) porn movie, with the same things happening over and over again -- and not in a "Groundhog Day" kind of way. The soundtrack was the best part of the movie, but can't make up for the rest of the waste of the 20 minutes it took us to watch this movie with fast-forwarding through the massively graphic violence. I've read most of the books about the Black Dahlia and figured the movie would play fast and loose with the facts. I shouldn't have worried about that. Using the device of The Black Dahlia didn't get in their way for a minute. I'm sure the producers counted on people making the mistake we did. DON'T rent this movie.