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.

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.

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.

I believe that this is the worst movie I've ever seen.... and I sat through "Atomic Train". At least that has Mena Suvari in it, so I can watch it with the sound off. "Black Dahlia" had not a single virtue. No humor. No plot. No acting. No Irony. There's not a single interesting, entertaining or amusing thing about this movie. I wanted really badly to walk out, but my movie mate drove and insisted on staying. I wanted to stay in the theater watching this schlock only slightly more than I wanted to risk hypothermia. It was a tough choice; watch "Black Dahlia" or die. Death would have been only slightly worse. This movie just plain sucked. It wasn't even interesting by accident. 'Nuff said. This movie just sucked. Addendum: Okay, some of the the music was good.

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!!