Directors: Everything is
Terrible!
Cast: Hundreds of dogs and James
Belushi's reaction faces
To begin with, this compilation
of existing footage comes from Everything Is Terrible, a video blogging website
whose origins go as far back as 2000 but properly launched their website in
2007, collecting together various pieces of filmed ephemera, for YouTube and
online videos, publics screenings and DVD releases. In this case they can be
can be seen as cinema's version of "plunderphonics", a term
especially with the group Negativland
who used existing sources to subvert their content and wider meanings.
Everything Is Terrible were likely helped through their existence
by the burgeoning fascination with eighties VHS culture, purveyors and
archivists of all the bizarre self released material even into the nineties
that was available in the United States, even commercial tapes from that era
onwards that we look on in hindsight at on YouTube
dumbfounded with. The British like myself know this through anything from
exercise videos and instructional films, but the United States is a
significantly bigger country, with a bigger industry, and Everything Is Terrible can also add to this the likes of public
access television, able to draw on the religious (Christian work about a dog
puppet praying to Jesus) to whatever odd things are possibly found at the back
of a garage.
Poochiewoochies admittedly, in its tale to retell Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973) with dog
videos, pulls from more Hollywood films and straight to video work, but when
you see the likes of the dog message segments, that's the type of work EiT
is famous for, cutting out some of the choice titbits alongside the most banal
of dog films to create this production. Also, yeah, let's step back as The Holy Mountain in cult circles is a
big film, Jodorowsky off the back of
funding from the Beatles manager Allen Klein making a tale of spiritual
discovery which was surreal and truly bizarre. The initial text is already
weird, so this framework retold with dogs is admittedly intriguing. It is one
of Doogiewoogiez's crutches to
hinder it however as, whilst it could work perfectly as a template for an
odyssey, it's barely used and vague here as a structure.
Why was it used? Possibly the
idea of "God = Dog" joke and there is the scene where the group of
followers wishing to become enlightened have their consciousnesses connected to
an actual dog, a sequence whose sound clip to first person dog shots from
various sources does work in Doogiewoogiez.
As a result, the vagueness of the structure means this still requires the other
film to work, which wouldn't be an issue weren't it not for the fact that it's
left as a disjointed collection of pieces which can tire without context. The
structural choice only works occasionally when it's explicitly pulling from the
source material, including the introduction of those followers, who were given
little stories each within The Holy Mountain, here used to go into segments
such as dogs and sex, dogs in sports etc.
It does tap into the really
questionable attitudes we have when it comes to our pets, and I say this as
someone who grew up with dogs (specifically boxers) all my life and love them.
Alongside our habit to fixate over animals even over fellow human beings - such
as is the case with us British - alongside the complacent view we have about
how unique human beings are. This works both ways as, in one of the best
aspects of the film, the research done, you see just how much embarrassing material
our four legged friends have had to put up with, be it being forced into
costumes or a cavalcade of badly animated mouth movements plastered over their
faces. Even before I consider my own opinions, that as there is no Dr. Doolittle
available, and thus we cannot truly talk to dogs and gauge a similar
intelligence to ours or not, the deep pit of dog films and television churned
out since the dawn of cinema, be it monochrome scenes of dogs being dressed
like cowboys to Marmaduke's artificial
distorted facial features, is a real sign of how we've come to abuse this is
cinema, even before the film shows all the times in fiction dogs were kicked,
threatened with being shot or having a blowtorch to their face in stories.
I say this as someone who argues
no idea, even a dog being allowed to play American football as in one film
here, is inherently bad, and that a great funny dog film can be made, but that
the evidence here shows all the ways we miss the mark without having to see the
entire length of them. Some pretty infamous material makes its appearance. Poochinski (1990), a failed TV pilot
about Peter Boyle being killed and
returning back as an English bulldog puppet, or Karate Dog (2004), one of Bob
Clark's last films about Chevy Chase
as a dog who has eventually has a fight with Jon Voight in the finale. James
Belushi also becomes the unofficial mascot for all the reaction shots he
has over the film, all possibly because (like Cuba Gooding Jr and even older Vincent
Price) he made one film involving a dog, K-9 (1989), which is gone to constnalty through the film for clips.
Many mainstream films like Snow Dogs (2002) and Air Bud (1997) appear. With all the
narratives excised, you forget how bizarre a lot of these films are in
hindsight, and there is a good moment where, in pain staking research, the same
plot points are repeated together from these films, from child protagonists
always losing parents to vague film disease/car crash incidents off-screen or
how dog related genital/buttock trauma is a common joke throughout these films.
The reference to Negativland is appropriate as, honestly,
there was many missed opportunities in terms of subverting their material. Negativland can be humorous but also hit
salient points, and the only time Doogiewoogiez
stands on that band's shoulders, heavy handed but perfectly justified, is the
segment that starts with racial stereotypes (both dogs literally dressed as
stereotypical African tribes people to the obsession with "urban"
slang even from young male characters let alone dogs) before getting into the
idea of dog breeds I myself have always had a concern about. The idea that the
obsession with breeding exact breeds and marginalisation of
"mongrels", if applied to human beings, would be eugenics, which EiT in their one great moment here don't
pussyfoot around mocking, alongside bizarre clips like a British woman being
interviewed and presuming because she has a Chihuahua, a dog of Mexican origins,
it presumably likes Mexican food.
Mostly Doogiewoggiexz goes for obvious jokes, some choice cuts of weirdness
that are too many to pick out, from farts being used to stop dog chupacabras,
to dogs playing baseball. It does cause one to be amused that, in a hundred
years, we've covered so much with dogs you can have the aforementioned brawl between
Jon Voight and a CGI dog, or that
certain actors like Cuba Gooding Jr. appear
in these films in their long, varying careers. It's a shame the structure isn't
enough still, the weakest material all the manipulation of used images into
psychedelic video collage material, not exactly compelling to be frankly. The
only aspect of those sequences, which look like the kind of online videos that
became dime a dozen on YouTube, is how Harry the Bigfoot, from Harry and the Hendersons (1987), is an honorary
member of that collage despite being a cryptozoological ape creature that the
creators clearly were obsessed with since childhood.
The other issue is that frankly Doggiewoggiez is ironic to a fault. A
sarcasm does feel pronounced throughout, and it's felt especially with the use
of Christian material as there's always a cheapness to the humour, a laboured
nature when the material itself, when bad, should be allowed to hang itself on
its own petard, and other moments like the humanoid dog puppet who prays to
God, who in scenes is panicked and scared, would be far more fascinating for me
to see in their original context to unpick. Material like a young boy dancing
and singing Magic Dance by David Bowie with actors in dog costumes,
after a talking well has told him he can do so if he wishes to, is weird but
there's a charm too, a production like this not realising that for every
eyebrow raising and questionable piece there's others which are more
sympathetic for me beyond taking lines of dialogue out of context for crude jokes
or to be just laughed at. Yes, some of it deserves to be questioned, like Tim Allen in a family film being naked
in front of his wife and kids after turning back from being a dog, but even the
dippy and strange things like people who believing their dogs are psychics and
reincarnated spirits are still human beings to be considered. And all of this
is in knowledge that the project was always meant to be fun first; it's just
that it needed to be more focused and sharper.
Abstract Spectrum: Kitsch/Psychotronic/Surreal
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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