Last year’s The Black Dahlia was a mediocre movie about the police investigation of an actress no one would have remembered if she hadn’t been murdered and cut in half. Now Variety is reporting that Grindhouse star Rose McGowan will play B-movie actress Susan Cabot, who was also murdered. Because the title The Black Dahlia was already taken, this movie will be called Black Oasis. Originality is what Hollywood is all about.

Susan Cabot was an actress in the 50’s who starred in some television and movie westerns and appeared in five Roger Corman movies between 1957 and 1958 (and you think Will Ferrell makes a lot of movies.) After briefly “dating” King Hussein of Jordan and leaving film acting in 1960, she primarily acted on stage in New York. In 1986 her son Timothy, a dwarf with pyscological problems, killed her with a weightlifting bar.

Black Oasis will be written and directed by Stephan Eliot, who previously made the cult hit The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert That movie came out 12 years ago and Mr. Eliot has directed two flops since then, but I’m sure he still has what it takes to film a dwarf bludgeoning his mother. One of the producers, Hilary Shor, says the movie will harken back to cinema classics like Sunset Boulevard. "This is a story in the 'stranger than fiction' style of 'Hollywood Babylon,' and a little-known chapter in the seedy underbelly of that era," she said. Maybe… but a C-list actress like McGowan and a director who is looking like a one-cult-hit wonder may not be able to raise this above direct-to-DVD status.