Blast Hardcheese 636 Posted January 15, 2014 In the mid-1990's, everyone seemed to be attempting the Quentin Tarantino thing. Only where Tarantino's movies used hyper violence to punctuate his stories, these opportunistic carbon copies used their so-called stories to punctuate hallow, mind-numbing violence. What resulted were mostly stylisticly superficial films (Love and a .45, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Reindeer Games, etc.) One film in particular, though, was egregiously unctuous in this rip-off regard (and did an extremely piss poor job at pulling it off): Mad Dog Time Taking place a planet in another solar system populated by 1950's-era gangsters for some reason, this movie stars Richard Dreyfuss, Gabriel Byrne, Jeff Goldbum, and a shitload of 90's ol' familiars that really should have known better. REALLY should have known better. Billed as a crime comedy, nearly every scene in this film ends with a character or two being shot to death. Mad Dog Time's conceit being that character after character exiting via violent circumstances is hilarious. Too bad the comedy falls completely flat, thus robbing the screen further of these rich, one-dimensional characters. While not busy boring you with plodding scene after plodding scene (that practically seems the same as the one that came before it), the dialog in Mad Dog Time carries a certain idiotic smugness about it that makes you physically cringe for the actor saying it (especially Jeff Goldblum, who plays it so embarrassingly cool, you just know he's got all the angles dialed in. So, yeah: zero character arc and a tidy no-stakes-lost film's end pay-off). Never has a movie been at once so smug, shrill and broke-ass boring as the trivial mess slowly crawling across the screen. Mad Dog Time isn't just a horrible movie; it's an endurance test caked in layers of maddening failure. How did this get made? Share this post Link to post
PlanBFromOuterSpace 3138 Posted January 16, 2014 This brings to mind another Tarantino clone, "Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane", which I caught on Cinemax one time and thought was complete garbage. In an interesting turn of events though, the guy that made that was Joe Carnahan, who went on to make some pretty good things, including the pilot for the upcoming "Those Who Kill" on A&E that I was briefly a production assistant on! Cheap plugs away! Share this post Link to post
sillstaw 414 Posted January 17, 2014 Roger Ebert's zero-star review of this is gold. The choice line: “Mad Dog Time” is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching “Mad Dog Time” is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line. 1 Share this post Link to post
