shannon-bill

...and is as middle of the road, pedestrian and blindly vanilla as this was, it's a dog.

Silly me for for looking at the associated artwork of two demonic-looking dogs and expecting, or more like hoping, that maybe The Dogs would harken back to classic "dog horror" like 1977s The Pack or 1983s Cujo. Wishful thinking. No, this in no way approaches those fine movies, nor does it even approach 1982s White Dog.

For starters, the titular dogs don't get more than 2 minutes of screen time. For the other 95 long minutes we're subjected to the hackneyed story of a mom and son fleeing an abusive husband and father, the son trying to fit in at his new school and the mom's burgeoning new relationship. Sprinkled in is a trite ghost story and the neighbor/landlord who knows all about the history of the home. What it isn't is creepy and it certainly isn't scary. The vibe is similar to a Lifetime movie and the scare value makes the Goosebumps TV series of the mid-90s look like The Exorcist.

I love movies that take place in the wilderness. Forests and woods are primeval and bewitching. I was pretty optimistic about this one based on the very little I knew about it. It was nicely shot and the locations were great. The story though was a bit of a letdown. My dismay is down to the character of Irving. She was very hard to sympathize with. She was largely ungrateful and cold.

And of course there had to be a hint of her attraction to the same sex! It's 2025 after all and no movie can be greenlighted without tipping the hate to the alternative lifestyle community. Also mandatory is a storyline about recovering from abuse at the hands of a man. Ugh.

The little twist at the end was weirdly done and somewhat confusing but mostly it was unnecessary. A perfectly good man versus nature story ruined by being trendy. A shame.

In my experience it's never a good thing to have the writer also direct. When you add acting into the equation, you're doomed. One Victor Soares played the hat trick here. His direction was made easier by relying on a variation of the "found footage" genre, here using a "livestream" as his crutch... or in this case his walker.

His "hyper-manic Brazilian" character was especially annoying and would've been the low point, acting-wise in most no-budget movies, but here there were even more blatant offenders.

The main character was played by Sarah Moliski, it was her live feed and she was the master, or mistress, of ceremonies. Another absolutely spastic role of overacting and that Gen Z/Millennial sort of attitude that fills Tik-Tok and YouTube with their willful ignorance and airheaded know-it-all-ness. Oh, she plays it to perfection and I'll grant that her character felt legit. I hope she's nothing like that in real life. But the death of her character, like that of Soares, was not lamentable. More likely cathartic.

Mao Sun played a wannabe actor and funnily enough, he was the least talented thespian of a weak bunch. He wasn't asked for much and yet still struggled.

But the main problem was the writing. It really was pedestrian. Examples are rife, you'll see.

The location was cool and could've been much better utilized. It's a shame the writer/director/actor's ego got in the way. Jack of all trades, master of none

Add this together with a zero budget and, well, you're lucky you emerged with four stars from this viewer.

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