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| Roxie Releasing | Release Date: January 15, 1993 |
Starring:
André Laime, Benoît Poelvoorde, Édith Le Merdy, Hector Pappaert, Jacqueline Poelvoorde-Pappaert, Jenny Drye, Malou Madou, Nelly Pappaert, Rachel Deman, Willy Vandenbroeck
Summary:
A film crew follows a ruthless thief and heartless killer as he goes about his daily routine. But complications set in when the film crew lose their objectivity and begin lending a hand.
Genre(s):
Drama, Comedy, Crime
Runtime:
95 min
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Man Bites Dog defines audacity. An assured, seductive chamber of horrors, it marries nightmare with humor and then abruptly takes the laughter away. Intentionally disturbing, it is close to the last word about the nature of violence on film, a troubling, often funny vision of what the movies have done to our souls.
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Is it a comedy? A documentary? An underground gore-fest? Man Bites Dog, the first feature film from Belgian director Rémy Belvaux, is all of these and much more, a ghastly, shocking and explosive debut with all the genuinely ruthless ability to disturb as an oily blue-barreled revolver jammed in your mouth. And it's funny, too.
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In going revoltingly over the top, Belvaux and company are out to shake up people's cozy, passive, detached relationship with violence - on and off the screen. By indulging in sensational footage, the real-life filmmakers can't help being part of the problem themselves - particularly since they wouldn't know a consistent viewpoint if it bit them. [14 May 1993, p.38]
So sick and twisted it makes David Lynch look like Walt Disney...This unrelenting, deeply upsetting image of a society in thrall to its own worst impulses recalls Stanley Kubrick's ``A Clockwork Orange,'' another suffocatingly thorough depiction of a world steeped in brutality. Man Bites Dog is a similar combination of impressive and repulsive. [3 Apr 1993, p.C10]
The result would be hilarious if it weren't for its grisly and often deliberately pointed subject matter. There seems little to do but to laugh or retch. The fact that you may well do both at the same time is probably the film's intention. It has a serious point to make about the media's complicity in violence. But, in making it, it may well defeat its own ends with too many absurdist touches. [14 Jan 1993, p.8]
This wildly overpraised Belgian mock-documentary might have been a lacerating 10-minute Swiftian satire of the media's never-ending thirst for blood. Instead, it's a 95-minute reiteration of the obvious that manages simultaneously to offend and bore. [11 June 1993, p.24]
Jul 21, 2020
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