Rottweiler (2004)
- Andrew Smith
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
"Eat. Sleep. Fetch. Kill."
Plot
Escaping from an immigration camp in futuristic Spain, Dante heads off to find his lost girlfriend who he left behind after his capture. He is relentlessly pursued by a bounty hunter and his tracker dog ROTT; a vicious rottweiler that had been left for dead and has now been rebuilt stronger as cyborg with fangs and jaws of steel.
Review
Sounds like the recipe for a decent horror timewaster, doesn't it? Some sort of Man's Best Friend meets The Terminator. Well you're wrong! If ludicrous special effects, a ‘killer’ rottweiler which just wants to nuzzle up to you, lots of gratuitous nudity, some bizarre plot twists, a last hurrah for a Spanish horror legend, and a close-up of a chicken-in-peril are your thing, then maybe Rottweiler is up your street. For anyone else, this is dog poo on the grandest scale. Director and producer Brian Yuzna knew how to turn a silly idea into an effective horror film (The Dentist should never be watched by anyone with a vague phobia of the dentist!) as, in his various guises as producer, director and writer, he was behind the likes of Re-Animator, From Beyond and Society, as well Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Having collected a large following in Europe, Yuzna started the film label Fantastic Factory over in Spain, with a goal to produce ‘modestly budgeted genre films for the international market’ using genre stars and local talent. Fantastic Factory churned out a slew of horror films in the 00s including Arachnid, Faust: Love of the Damned, Beneath Still Waters and the second Re-Animator sequel, Beyond Re-Animator to name some. Rottweiler was another one and judging by the final product, it’s a case of something lost in translation.
Rottweiler has no business being as plain awful as it is. It could have knowingly winked at it's audience a few times but it's played straight up from the get-go and this stonewall approach doesn't do it any favours. It just goes through the motions from start to finish, never really stringing together an effective story or creating any excitement or scares. It’s all down to the editing and how the narrative is structured which becomes more incoherent the longer the film goes on. Adapted from the novel El Perro by Spanish writer Alberto Vázquez Figueroa, the flimsy plot about the prisoner running from the dog is the entire story and it's nowhere near enough to fill ten minutes, let alone the entire film. A chase sequence is a mechanism for a climax. It's not a substitute for a narrative engine. In a well-structured chase film, like if you think about Mad Max: Fury Road or The Terminator, the parameters of the chase are constantly evolving, and the odds are forever changing. Here, you get a very rinse-and-repeat structure where Dante encounters someone on his travels, engages with them for a few scenes and then the rottweiler catches up and kills someone before Dante gets away.
Only you never really invest in Dante as a character and therefore never care whether he gets to his destination and his girlfriend or not. The characters he encounters aren’t fleshed out enough, but the poor dubbing and ropey English-speaking Spanish actors don’t do the film any favours. Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy, who holds the record for the greatest number of roles as a werewolf amongst other horror characters, is on hand as the sadistic warden (he must be one of the ‘genre stars’ that Yuzna wanted to use in his films). There are lots of flashbacks to what happened to Dante in the immigration camp, and these are just thrown around wherever in the film with little or no purpose to seemingly pad out some more screen time. It gets confusing when you don't know whether what is happening is a flashback or in the present – speaking of which, the ‘future’ was then 2018 and now I sit and re-write this review in 2026 and wonder just where the time went!
Yuzna doesn't know what type of flick he wants to make here so ends up just rehashing elements of horror, revenge flicks and chase films where someone is pursued through the wilderness. The horror element would have worked best had the rottweiler actually been a lot bigger than it was (after all, it was supposed to have been rebuilt so they could have made it huge). With just a few nods to the design of the exoskeletons in The Terminator, this rottweiler does look bad ass, even if the effects team don’t do such a great job of animating it. They commit the cardinal sin of having the dog appear different sizes depending on the situation that the script dictates. In some scenes the rottweiler looks to be an actual real-life rottweiler, gleefully running around the film set wanting to play with some soft toy. In other scenes it's a fearsome CGI beastie, walking through fire like Satan himself. And in other scenes, the dog is shown in close-up as a cheap-looking puppet head with false teeth. The metal teeth appear at will too - in some scenes the dog has a perma-grin on its face and in other scenes, the teeth are nowhere to be found at all. There are some reasonably decent gore effects in Rottweiler too as the dog spends a good percentage of its screen time chewing people up and tearing off limbs, and the camera doesn't shy away from any of that.
The bizarre and downright perverse sexual undercurrent to the film really adds to the problems as well. What's the first thing you would do if you were being chased by a killer rottweiler with metal teeth that could rip you in two straight away? Why take off your clothes and go and bath in the lake! This leads to one of the longest full frontal male shots I've ever seen. But Dante runs away naked to the house of a horny Spanish woman and her child. The woman holds him at gunpoint for a bit before taking him into her bedroom and romping with him. At the same time, the rottweiler is trying to break into the house but he’s too busy getting his leg over to bother. A little nudity and exploitation is expected in low-budget horror film, after all it’s appealing to a certain demographic, but there’s something a bit off about everything here.
Final Verdict
A dog's dinner is a chaotic, unappetizing mess made of scraps that really don't belong together. It perfectly encapsulates the structural, visual, and tonal failures of Rottweiler. There was clear ambition here by Fantastic Factory and Brian Yuzna to create something more memorable, but he really needed better quality filmmakers around him to work out lots of the issues here. It is just a waste of time from start to finish. A silly plot with no real meat to keep it going, a strange sexual element, poor special effects and some lousy acting really.
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Rottweiler Director(s): Brian Yuzna Writer(s): Alberto Vázquez Figueroa (book), Miguel Tejada-Flores (additional dialogue) Actor(s): William Miller, Irene Montalà, Paulina Gálvez, Cornell John, Lluís Homar, Paul Naschy, Nicholas Aaron, Lolo Herrero Duration: 95 mins |  |
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