ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA
Zero Stars out of 4
Unrated
Directed by Ulli Lommel

Now I know how Judge Judy feels. Public mediation on a petty dispute between two parties who are equally disturbing and obsessive.

The subject is an actress: One Elissa Dowling. Every time Miss Dowling stars in a movie, a cabal of creepy internet window-lickers rises as one to defend her. Inversely, there is ALSO a cabal of creepy internet window-lickers devoted to tearing her down. And thus, an extremely pale and loserly internet flame war erupts every time she is mentioned anywhere, up to and including right here at horroryearbook.

Being that I find both these parties equally despicable and sad, I am impartial by default. Can Elissa Dowling cut the mustard, at least according to a mildly interested third party? More on that to follow. First and foremost I have a movie to review.

You can tell a movie is shatteringly and mind-numbingly bad when Karl Rove and a bunch of chanting, torch-bearing druids accompany its Netflix sleeve to your mailbox. ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA is such a film. Thanks to Mr. Lommel and Lionsgate films, my TV now has gonorrhea from the simple act of displaying it. I am not alone in my assessment, for I have read comments on IMDB and elsewhere not only calling it the worst film ever made, but the worst 15/25/30 minutes they’ve ever seen because they bailed out early.

Only my dedication to my job kept me watching this piece of shit and even THAT was strained near the closing stretches. It’s like seeing a kid puke at Disneyland, and the actual vomit is this weird color mixture of forest green and fuchsia. Not only does one wonder how such a thing could happen, but you’re pretty sure it defies one of God’s fundamental tenets of existence.

Frankly, I’m a little ashamed to live in a world where ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA is even possible.

The story (which proves that an eighty-one minute movie indeed CAN be made off of just four pages of a script) involves some broad in a Catholic Schoolgirl outfit (Dowling, playing a character that writer Lommel neglected to even name) holding auditions for the part of The Black Dahlia. The Black Dahila, for those who haven’t read James Ellroy’s wonderful book or seen Brian DePalma’s unfairly maligned film, is Elizabeth Short, a young lady who was found dismembered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947, thus resulting in the largest manhunt in the history of the state of California.

Those who aren’t right for the part are slaughtered just like Short was by the Schoolgirl’s two beefy pet waterheads. And I would like to look up who plays these two, but not only do these characters not have names either, but aren’t given any dialogue.

This scenario repeats with a few actresses, the scenes are intercut with an ongoing police investigation and, um… That’s it. Like I said, there’s only about four pages of script here, but it seems that an eighty minute movie was also made with about sixteen feet of videotape. Trust me, this was ALL fixed in editing. It randomly throws shots of some lady walking through a graveyard and Dowling marching in her bedroom in army fatigues for NO APPARENT REASON WHATSOEVER. It switches from black and white, to color, to black and white again. The shutter slows down and speeds up at the whims of the editors and the film is plagued by such jittery and nonsensical cutting that it make any standard Michael Bay movie look like a Yasujiro Ozu masterpiece.

At some point one of the defenders of this movie might cry out in protest that I’m shitting on a movie that was made so cheaply, to which I must smile and hug myself because I was lucky enough to see STUPID TEENAGERS MUST DIE! before most of the rest of the world. I tell you, STMD! gets better and better every time I see a runny piece of neglectful horror shit like this. Not only is it CHEAPER than ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA, but it was made lovingly and carefully with wonderful actors and a gleefully ironic script.

There is no love or care or wonder or irony involved with ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA. I might understand giving it a pass if it were made as a practice swing by some eager young hot shot, but Ulli Lommel is in his sixties and was fortunate enough to work with Fassbinder on LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH and many others. So unless this is some kind of odd-ball experiment in cinematic Dadaism utilizing “anti-filmmaking,” I can think of no plausible defense. I just prefer to think that Lommel sucks balls as a director.

This flick is so bad that I am gonna do something that I never thought I would do in my natural life. For the first (and probably last) time ever, I am actually going to DEFEND Uwe Boll and Eli Roth. Boll actually received a doctorate in Literature from the University of Cologne, thus enabling him to know more about what’s wrong with his shitty movies than any of US do. So we can step back and at least appreciate the irony. And at least with HOSTEL PART II, I had an emotional investment in how bad it was. I can get neither from ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA, which comes on like a noxious fart, leaves just as quickly and is made by a director who I think sincerely believes that his movie is REALLY GOOD!

And now for the moment of truth. The sixty-four thousand dollar questions. Is Elissa Dowling as bad an actress as her detractors would have us believe? Is she as good as her fans would make her out?

Truth be told, I’m not siding with the angels on this one. I have the utmost assurances that she works hard and is a nice person by her fans, but its hard to take all that into consideration with her blisteringly bad performance here. She’s like cardboard… Loud, shrieky cardboard. This is the first time in my years of going to the movies where the line “SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING C**T!” was robbed of the oomph inherent in its phrasing. And had she let off that grating, annoying, cocktail party villain laugh ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, I could not have been held responsible for my actions.

And yet… It would be churlish of me to count her out just yet. It’s odd that I’m introduced to Dowling in a film dealing with The Black Dahlia, because when I saw Brian DePalma’s THE BLACK DAHLIA last year, I finally let go of my hatred for Josh Hartnett. He has a sorrowful, deep voice and coal-dark eyes tailor made for film noir. He was in his element and, for the first time, I couldn’t knock him. He did well.

What Dowling is tailor made for, at this point, I cannot tell. All I know is that ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA sure as hell ain’t it.

Zero Stars out of 4

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