Dogs

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.

a true story.

at 13 & 10, my younger brother and i, who had a large 2 yr old neighborhood Shepperd (turk), went to see this movie and were unaware of the terror this film evoked until coming home from the theater that night. being a neighborhood dog, turk was roaming in the night alley as we walked by.

recognizing us, of course, with his reflective eyes, the dog advanced toward us. if you can imagine two boys being chased by their own dog down the street screaming murder, in sheer terror. we were banging on the door for help. the dog thought we were playing and joined in and further excited our fears.

over 20 yrs later my brother and i tell that story with fond memories of the era the dog and the movie.

having grown up in the horror hay-day of the 70s and having, arguably, seen the best and worst that Hollywood has to offer. psychologically, this film teems with possibilities for a remake. without all that computer generated junk.

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).

I was in high school. Most of this film was filmed at Southwestern College in Chula Vista CA.

They allowed dozens of local people to be unpaid extras in scenes where they needed running scared people. Our only pay was one free meal from the catering truck. I got David McCallums autograph.

I love such kind of movies with killer animals. But if i have to be honest, most are mediocre to bad (acting, cinematography, script and so on). They of course are low budget, so they have their excuse, and they are usually from new (at that time) directors.

Anyway, this movie turned out to be quite nice. Maybe because i had lower expectations, but it exceeded them. The first part of the movie is kinda slow, but it builds up nicely after that. Acting wasn't terrible, camera work wasn't terrible, and they use real dogs which is typical for most of the movies with dogs from that time. My biggest enjoyment was that the science talk was quite accurate, not random stupid BS i hear in many movies, that sometimes is so stupid it must be written by a 1st grader.

There were quite some dogs in this movie, all kinds of breeds. Tho it would have been scarier if there were few angry mad chihuahua dogs because they are vicious for their tiny size. Or a slow pug that is trying to be scary but too chubby and clumsy and slow to do any harm.

Over. Decent chill evening movie. I'd say between 4 and 5, giving some extra because it was better than i expected, and because of the decent science talk ( i took like 2 points out from the giant mantis for the stupidest science dialogues ive ever heard)