Film Review: MONSTER DOG (1984, Claudio Fragasso)

Stars: 3 of 5.
Running Time: 81 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Alice Cooper.
Tag-line: " Twenty years later, the nightmare begins again and now it's Lou's turn to pay..."
Best exchange:"Listen, werewolves DO exist." –"Oh, bullshit, Vince! The year 2000 is just around the corner. I am a recognized expert in electronic videos and you are the hottest rock n' roll star - in the world! You're making records, videos, movies - on high-tech electronic equipment of fantastic sophistication. You can get on a plane tonight and be in Australia tomorrow. And you're scared of werewolves."

"You look like a couple of queers to me! Queers make...MY STOMACH TURN!" What we have here is a rather curious specimen. An ‘American’ werewolf flick (starring Alice Cooper as a rock star named "Vincent”) made by Italians- to be precise, Claudio Fragasso, the same Italian who was the brains behind such made-up sequels as TROLL 2, EVIL DEAD 5: LA CASA, TERMINATOR II: SHOCKING DARK, and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 3: NIGHT KILLER.

Here, using the sobriquet "Clyde Anderson," Fragasso skulks around like a thief in the night, peddling his plagiaristic Italo-trash to the unsuspecting. Right off the bat, let me say this: MONSTER DOG is no TROLL 2. It certainly has elements of TROLL 2, like creepy villagers' laughably ominous warnings, overuse of the line "I can hardly believe the nightmare is over," a lot of talk about pissing (“You was more full of water than the Hoover Dam!”), and the mention of “hospitality” a few times (!).

"You was more full of water than the Hoover Dam!"


There's plenty of driving scenes to pad the run-time.


The vanity plate. (Alice's real name is Vincent Furnier.)


The eponymous MONSTER DOG. Rick Baker, eat your heart out.

Alice wears stodgy sweaters and dubbed by somebody who sounds kind of like Kermit the Frog. Later, when it briefly turns into a Spaghetti Western, Alice is wearing eye-makeup, a ruffled shirt, and toting a shotgun in time for a Castellari-esque shootout.


YAHHHHH

The eponymous "Monster Dog" is papier-mache and lots of imagination, fog machines work serious overtime, heavily-sedated killer canines look less like hell-hounds and more like sad-sacks, and the shittiest 80's A/V equipment you've ever seen is referred to as "hi-def electronic equipment of incredible sophistication." The high point is probably the Alice music video "Identity Crisis-es" (which features Alice as James Bond:

Billy the Kid:

Sherlock Holmes:

and Jack the Ripper:

and ties into his masterful 1983 Multiple Personality Disorder concept album, DADA) which serves as the film’s opening and closing scenes. Except at the end, it's been re-edited to act as a kind of greatest hits of “memorable” scenes from the movie. Since this is theoretically better than watching the entire movie, I have posted it below:

Let me add this up: TROLL 2 + Alice Cooper, divided by dubbed Alice and a damned sluggish 81 minutes = 3 stars.

-Sean Gill