Dog Pound

Dog Pound had a huge effect on me unlike most films that have come out in the past couple months. You start to really feel for the characters and their issues also everything during the movie goes along smoothly. Every actor worked their role correctly and, in my opinion, perfectly. If people just truly gave a couple seconds to be down to earth with these juniors, just for once put yourself in their own positions, many of the problems in this film could of had a much better outcome. Great story, great action, and just overall a good watch. This is a must see for everyone who has the stomach and the mind set. These actions are actually happening today and needs to be solved.. but sadly I may not see it in my years.

A movie like "Dog Pound" has a lot of peers. Year after year of prison films (a dozen or two I've seen for myself) have honed a pretty basic cinematic structure. This film is about half-successful in avoiding the clichés. It does have one thing going for it - being the most recent to give a pretty much realistic account of the juvenile detention system. The pace of the story provides somewhat of the needed adrenaline charge for the thriller format, but it doesn't go nearly as far as it should. The soundtrack, for one, is a good example of this. It's virtually never needed, always intrusive. The acting is pretty much as expected. Given intense situations, the actors offer better performances than if asked to emote in a normal environment. And, if not necessarily better, at least more intense.

Kim Chapiron provides some interesting direction. Clean photography, 70s style use of zooms. It doesn't always work, but it keeps things interesting. The end result is a film that gives you enough to stay involved, if not quite enough to push it over into something you'd want to see again. Good enough.

This movie hit home for me because I was once locked up in a juvenile detention facility. The only thing I disagree with in this movie is the guards were not violent enough but the setting is the same if not worse on how you get treated by the people around you. For all the people who said this was a "Bad movie" "had no plot" you have never lived it so you would not have the first clue what this movie was attempting to convey with its ending and storyline. The psychology is nearly the same and it does not matter how you go in, your environment changes and with it you must change yourself. You may have heard the term "debt dog" but I doubt it. This movie hits as close as your going to probably get without someones story like mine.

Alan Clarke made the violent and barbaric movie Scum 31 years ago and there have been various attempts with smiler movies since, all trying to become the daddy of juvenile delinquent dramas, from Sean Penn in Bad Boys to Larry Clarke's Kids. This avaricious animal is the most successful attempt thus far. This attempt, albeit billed as 'inspired' by scum, is inherently a remake with three miscreants sent to a juvenile facility in Montana, with no chance of any hope of reform, forced into a system of sheer brutality forcing Butch (Adam Butcher) to go on the rampage. And though Alan Clarke's original film still has the edge, this perhaps has more relevance for a new generation of cinema goers which cleverly used real ex prisoner instead of conventionally well know actors, helping in part to set a more real and gritty tone. Having said all that I did enjoy it.

Straight to the point: one of these movies where the plot is very basic, the characters easily identifiable; interestingly, two strong points; yet despite all the conventionality, this style of realistic movies never suffers from a lack of imagination. It is rather the crude, raw scenes that are sought out, actors with faces that tell a story, a fluid motion from scene to scene without all the pretentious cinematic effects (symbols, metaphors, angles, music etc...).

Like I said, straight to the point.

And where this movie might lack in depth, it solidifies the viewers' expectations all through the one channel of ADRENALINE. It's violent, raw, vivid...such a sober experience through the scope of tale-telling art.

Some flaws will appear clearly by the end of the movie. Perhaps a rushed scene or two - a little more footage or info in the end, that culminating to the point of the viewer looking back and asking himself how this movie stormed past his eyes so fast, in the method of a one-dimensional scene-after-scene procedure.

This film is genuinely "lived". The power-trip it represents and authenticity factors give this about a 7.