Movie: "When Dogs Die" (1973)

This is easily the worst movie ever made - or is it just that it's too 'artsy' to be understood? Heck; maybe it's a masterpiece! Maybe I've sold it short all these years. Maybe it's been unfairly ridiculed.

Naa, it's a stinker. But as far as I know, nothing in my really big box of really old super 8 films predates this 'existential' romp with George, Paul, Mike and Fred in the spring of 1973. "When Dogs Die". I think Don gave me the title. These may very well be the first scenes I ever shot with a movie camera. Of anything. All the tell tale signs are there: aimless direction, aimless plotline, aimless camerawork.






Paul wonders how he will explain his participation in this movie to any friends or family that might eventually be unfortunate enough to stumble across it.





These convoluted film clips - combining together in a futile attempt to form a 'storyline' - were recently found in the same large, brown paper bag that was living the silent life in a corner of my storage room (mentioned a few blog reports back) with all the other footage I obviously deemed disposable 35 years ago. Every foot/metre was unspooled and twisted around as if I'd just jammed a fist full of french fries into a take out bag at the local fast food drive thru window - without any consideration for future use.

Still, as bad as it is, it's more interesting than "Billy's Epic Journey" - a film that, you may recall, was entered in the bleedin' 1975 Philum Festival for crying out loud. This "Dogs" dud surely outshines the "Epic" dud - altho neither dud would have come close to winning the prestigious 'Golden Apple' award. (Trivia note: If memory serves me correctly, the one and only Golden Apple Award for 1975, was presented to the film: "Don and Darcy Have Fun".)

About a month ago, I reconnected each piece of this mess back together with my handy/dandy splicing tape (which deserves a blog entry of it's own one of these days) and wrapped it all onto the tail end of another 400 foot roll of film heading for the DVD transfer guy in Richmond. When I returned to pick up the finished transfers from him, he told me how he'd watched this particular little movie of mine and it had left him speechless. He said he watched it more than a dozen times and each time it had touched his heart in a way that no fancy Hollywood movie ever could.

No I'm just kidding. He didn't say that. The movie stinks. But, because of it's heritage value and the seldom seen participants captured within it (one of them being dead already) this is a collectable item on the scale of 4 stars!