Rottweiler (2004)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) Writer-director Brian Yuzna has a fascinating off-the-wall horror filmography, but his twenty-first century production is a clear-cut (or two) beneath his 1980–1990s heyday, and Rottweiler is no exception. A fuzzy, foggy, feel-bad take on an implacable foe hunting down our protagonists, it’s a loose dystopian thriller in which a robotic dog keeps trying to kill an escaped convict. While that could be interesting in a straightforward thriller fashion, the script here feels overstuffed with tangents even at 95 minutes, diffusing whatever sustained tension a better screenplay could have built. The science-fictional portion of the film feels like a lazy afterthought to set up a fleeing convict and a robot dog—and exactly nothing else. The tension of the film repeatedly evaporates, and there’s some evidence that it can’t do much with the elements it has at its disposal: some deaths that should be shocking end up being dull, and an instance of animal death even turns out to be nothing short of hilarious. By the time we get to the so-very-serious downbeat ending, Rottweiler has managed to evacuate any sympathy we may have had for the characters and has bored audiences enough that any excuse to finish the film is welcome. It’s meandering, atonal, uninvolving and dull at once. Any budding screenwriter could have made this better, simply by ripping off Robert McKee’s basic advice: give us someone to root for, keep escalating the tension and pet the dog once in a while (literally, in this case). But no—hence wondering whatever happened to Yuzna. What a waste of potential—for the film, and for the director.