A general rule of thumb if you're making a killer dog movie.
You need killer dogs!
You can't just film a bunch of dogs running towards the camera and then pretend as if they're bloodthirsty murderers by simply splattering some red paint on your actors and having them act scared.
Or at the very least you can only get away with that trick once.
After that you have to find some other way to make the dogs seem more frightening.
Now the first half the movie doesn't really show the dogs. Everyone's just walking around in the pitch-dark, so you literally can't see what's going on.
Dog attacks only happen once or twice so you get a pretty minimal experience out of everything.
They start attacking more frequently as the movie progresses.
But it takes its time and this is a movie that pads out every moment they can get.
People are sitting around talking about mundane crap, wasting their time on a telephone or hanging out at a bar just waiting to run out the clock.
The worst part is the second half of the movie rushes things too quickly.
Characters are killed off screen. Plots are either forgotten or resolved simply by dog murder and other elements are just flat-out ignored .Such as the call to the Gouverneur to bring in backup to help with the dog situation.
Nothing comes of that!
The worst part is there's a point in this movie where the tension does start to ramp up.
You've got this half desecrated\abandoned town filled with hordes of unseen dogs that could attack you at any moment. The fear of isolation and danger starts to build up.
But then we cut that tension by showing either happy dogs running around, smiling they're adorable little smile. Or a cut over to a completely different part of the movie where there's hundreds of people sitting around. Thus losing the sense of foreboding.
It becomes almost comical at the end when this horde of high school / College students gets mauled to death by a couple of dogs.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be a bloodbath but come on. An entire group of students killed by half as many dogs.
So it shouldn't go without saying but 'Dogs' isn't anything too great.
It has a few interesting moments and it even has some character drama. But it all feels like it gets wasted in the second half after the first half took so long to get going. Even worse the movie ends on a kind of cliffhanger by revealing that cats are turning evil next.
And all I can say is: ''Where's my killer Cat movie!!
Where's my killer cat movie!!"
To give the film one legitimate piece of praise. It didn't humiliate one of its actresses by revealing her naked body when she goes to have a shower.
I mean it's the kind of thing you'd expect from the movie of this calibre.
The whole time watching that scene I kept thinking: "Oh don't take them out for Dogs. Not for Dogs.''
Wouldn't you know it, she didn't.
So good on you movie. You might be a low-grade horror film, but at least you're not a trashy.
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