ROTTWEILER

Dante, after being captured during a clandestine recovery operation, is held in a maximum-security prison on the Spanish coast. After about a year, Dante manages to escape and his first thought is to get news of his girlfriend, captured with him and of whom he has had no further news. But on the trail of the escapee, a ferocious rottweiler, made lethal by a series of mechanical prostheses implanted on his body, is unleashed. It could have ended up as just another clone of "Cujo", but Yuzna's film presents itself as a clumsy and disjointed action movie filled with gore. The idea is undoubtedly original, but it is poorly exploited due to an approximate script and, at times, confusing, filled with poorly inserted flashbacks and full of holes. The performers are another sore point of the film: the protagonist, an unknown and nude William Miller, displays an expressive range that goes from A to B and also seems unsuitable, given his frail physique, to play scenes similar to "Rambo". A winning card is represented by the mechanical special effects, with which the scenes with the dog, an animal version of "Terminator", are depicted; mid-low, but not bad the computer graphics, however, used very rarely. Decent also the gore effects, which give their best in the bloody attacks of the dog (to mention the scene where the woman is torn apart under the eyes of the little girl). This film certainly represents another proof of the declining phase in Yuzna's career, who, after the equally disappointing "Faust", gives us a new ugliness, showing us that the times when he made "Society" and "Return of the Living Dead 3" are now gone. We hope for an artistic rebirth in the future (but his recent "Beneath Still Waters" is not talked about very well either), but his stay in Fernandez's "Fantastic Factory" does not bode well.