Les chiens fous

I and several friends were students at Southwestern Community College and extras in film Dogs. I was pleased to be an extra and found the filming intriguing. We appeared several times on the campus shots. Some of the scenes were shot on my street. I have been unable to find a copy of the video.

I was really happy to find this film on one of the streaming services recently, because I still remember the ads in the newspaper when it came out in Japan in 1977. Finally seeing it for the first time, this movie is quite bad as I had expected. There is no nail-biting suspense, all the dogs are cute instead of scary, and people make stupid decisions which is so typical in this type of B-movie. But having said all that, I found this movie to be a bit charming. It has the nostalgia and cheesy taste of low-budget 70's films which I am so familiar with. I might have really loved the movie if I had seen it 43 years ago (when I was a nine-year old).

Dogs ain't a half bad made flick, about a potpourri of dogs, who meet up and go on a killing spree, killing anything animal or human. What is doing it? That's the million dollar question. It leads us to question our our species, as if becoming part of a gang, where we become brainwashed, and commit things we normally wouldn't do, if graduating to murder. But in this open ended, and not too optimistic film, that's pretty gruesome, near it's finale, it's M rating pushing it, we don't find out. Bugger. David McCallum lends a fine performance as the smart hunky professor of Scientology, the real smartie, determined to get to the bottom of the killings, those cattle mutilations early on, aren't for sheep lovers. The violence in Dogs in pretty raw and frank. A younger Linda Gray co-stars before her Dallas days, as Wyner's performance as the new Scientist was strong, and actually likable in a sense. Suspense runs high, some of it electric near the end, and is well executed, the opening music score with our favorite pooches in slo mo, all banding together, my favorite part. They're are some unintentionally funny moments, whether dialogue or acting, but they made 70's movies what they were. This is a well made film, badly dated "Yes", but bad, "No". Warning: Are some scenes are dog murder.

Southern California in the mid 1970's. Domesticated dogs are forming packs and start attacking farm animals, then humans, This may or may not be down to the presence of a nearby top secret Government linear accelerator (I didn't even try to figure what this was but I guess it makes a change to the good old atomic research stations). The plot is similar to that classic "The Birds" (1963), and one of the standout scenes (there aren't many) has Linda Gray take a shower but instead of Psycho's Norman Bates we get a vicious dog. Sadly Gray only appears for about 5 minutes throughout the movie, I would like to have seen more of her. Brit David McCallum gives by far the best performance, to be honest most of the cast are not very good, one or two exceptions. Real dogs are used and in fairness they are made to look fanged and vicious, there is a fair amount of gore (mainly after shots of victims), sadly the movie looks rather cheap and gets bogged down by some poor dialogue and slow scenes. I have seen much better made for TV movies from this period. The ending hints at a sequel, but with cats, this never materialised, maybe for the better.

Dogs (1976)

** (out of 4)

A small community is investigating some bizarre deaths and one man (David McCallum) thinks that it's a pack of dogs. These aren't wild dogs however. No, it is believed that these are a group of pets who have gone crazy for some reason and are now attacking humans.

In case you couldn't tell, this is yet another film in the "when nature attacks" genre, which took off after the success of JAWS. That film had a killer shark and overtime we'd have movies with killer bees, whales, grizzly bears, rats, rabbits and various other animals. DOGS isn't the best of the bunch but it's certainly not the worst of the bunch so you're entertainment level will certainly depend on your feelings towards the genre.

I've always enjoyed the genre so I can overlook some of the flaws that a film like DOGS has. The biggest problem with the film is the fact that it really doesn't rise above a made-for-TV level. Another problem is that the dogs aren't ever scary and there's certainly no tension to be had in any of the scenes. The highlight of the movie happens when four hunters are surrounded by the dogs during the night but this film should have been milked for some suspense.

McCallum is pretty bland in the lead role and no one here jumps off the screen, although fans of Wes Craven's THE HILLS HAVE EYES will enjoy seeing Russ Grieve here in a small part. I will say that the film is rather violent at times and included one really graphic sequence. I'd also argue that the ending isn't exactly what you'd expect. DOGS should have been better but as it is the film manages to be slightly entertaining.