Director Stacy Title and actor Jonathan Penner first joined forces for 1995's The Last Supper, a hit-or-miss black comedy that lampooned both right-wing zealots and the extremes of left-wing identity politics. For their second teaming, the duo chose a much more ambitious undertaking, a loose neo-noir retelling of Hamlet set in modern-day Los Angeles. Directed by Title, Let The Devil Wear Black stars the thoroughly unappealing Penner (of TV's abrasive Rude Awakening) as a troubled philosophy grad student—we know he's troubled because he discusses being institutionalized whenever possible—whose beloved father Chris Sarandon is murdered by his slimy brother (Jamey Sheridan). Riddled with Gen-X angst, Penner contemplates his fate, hangs with slacker variations on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and romances his Ophelia, a spacey rich girl played by an appropriately ethereal Mary-Louise Parker. The idea of pairing the dark moral ambiguity of Hamlet with the stylishly amoral conventions of film noir is intriguing, but Title's film, which the multi-talentless Penner also co-wrote and helped executive produce, is amateur hour all the way, distinguished only by its laughable pretensions. Penner's atrocious performance recalls the insufferable self-absorption of Eric Schaeffer, while his and Title's script abandons Shakespeare's language in favor of a Hamlet who confronts his uncle by insisting, "I know what you did, you fuck!" Meanwhile, its Gertrude (Jacqueline Bisset) seems to have wandered off the set of Dynasty. Set almost entirely at night, Let The Devil Wear Black aims for the dark, stylized atmosphere of noir but instead is just headache-inducing, murky, and never compelling. It may not be the worst Hamlet adaptation of all time, but it's a contender.