By Geno McGahee
I love movies about monsters in the woods. I am partial to Sasquatch, but I won’t complain if they mix it up a little. So when I saw the cover art for DOGMAN, I was excited. Right on the cover we see what looks to be a werewolf, but I guess it’s just half dog/half man. Whatever the case, it was cool. I am also a fan of low budget indie titles and this one fit that bill too. Oh what high hopes I had for this one.
Hank (Larry Joe Campbell) is a hunter. He loves shooting deer and has a lot of toys to help in the hunt. He has his bow and arrow and he just purchased one of those cameras that you tie to a tree and it is motion activated to take pictures of whatever wildlife should roam by. I began to think that we were going to get something really cool here. He’ll see the pictures of the dogman and then the dogman would attack the house and it’d be awesome. Nope. Not awesome.
Hank’s wife, Dorothy (Mariann Mayberry), has a broken leg due to a truck accident. She was chasing down her stolen snowmobile in a pickup truck when she hit a tree and now she’s in a wheelchair, leaving Hank to do all the housework, more or less. When Dogman, I think, steals the bow and arrow, Hank runs after it and runs right into a tree branch and knocks himself cold. He is awakened by his nephews and brought back home. I’m sorry if this review is boring you. At least you didn’t have to sit through this movie.
After his nephew is attacked, Hank teams up with a sheriff and a woman with knowledge about the dogman and they begin hunting it down. Hank gets attacked, but you never see the dogman. All you see is Hank dropping his camera and then he’s lying there with a bloody shoulder. Up to this point we had only seen part of dogman’s mouth and a little of his arm…and that’s all we are allowed to see.
I kept waiting for the dogman to appear and finally be killed or tear people up on screen. There is absolutely zero payoff here. The story moves along at a snail’s pace. Most of the scenes are completely unnecessary and are just filler, especially the hospital scenes. I held on throughout this film with the hope that I would get the dogman. I am not tough to please. Give me 80 minutes of a shitty film and then have a cool monster raising hell and I’ll forget all about the prior 80 minutes and give the freaking thing a thumbs up. But no. My guess is that the costume for the dogman was so terrible that they elected not to show it and just let the viewer’s imagination to run with it. This worked in THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, but it does not work here.
DOGMAN is terrible. Although the acting isn’t bad, the lack of any action and any drama make this a tough movie to sit through. The fact that the movie is called “DOGMAN” and you never see him, is ridiculous. If you went to see ROCKY and he was never in the film and you just found people in the ring with black eyes and unconscious as somebody yells “you just missed him,” you would be pissed. I’m pissed. I wanted Dogman.
I have seen a lot of terrible movies, but DOGMAN is one of the worst. What could have been potentially awesome was a snooze fest without any payoff of any sort. The twist at the end was stupid. I recommend that you avoid this one.
Rating: 1/10 – You just missed him.
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