Black Dahlia

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.

This is the worst "movie" ever made. Of course, calling it a movie is actually exaggerating its merits. No plot. No acting. No nothing. Two guys are silent for at least 45 minutes. One woman should have been. Sorry, but repeating "F___ you bitch!!!" fifty times does not constitute dialogue. Saying it with the same intonation fifty times makes you the anti-actress. Even the same gore was repeated over and over and over. (The "writer" couldn't come up with even a variation?)

Bottom line is there was nothing that you would define as a movie except that the videotape was transferred to DVD and sold in stores. Everyone involved should stay a long way from the business. You have not one iota of talent.

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 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.

Ulli Lommel's latest is a blatant attempt to cash in on Brian DePalma's BLACK DAHLIA. (But why, since that bombed??) This shot-on-video-with-non-actors disgrace is the kind of amateurish junk that gives all horror films a bad name. And we all know there are many good ones. This is not even a good "gore" film, even though there are plenty of severed limbs and lots of squishing blood; H.G. Lewis's films of the 60's were better than this, and that's saying a lot because Lewis' films are horrendous. But at least Lewis can say he was an innovator of sorts. Lommel's (so-called) films get worse with each outing.

This DAHLIA is boring, repetitious, pretentious and laughable. Even the "artsy" video effects can't hide just how junky and moronic this rip-off is.

Buyers and renters beware!!