Man Bites Dog

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. Read full review

Expertly shot in black and white on a shoestring budget (though maybe 10 minutes tool long), this fierce, smart jape gets you shaking with laughter, then leaves you simply shaking. [26 Apr 1993, p.64]

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. Read full review

It's not closed text, but a work of art that needles and disturbs. [14 May 1993, p.H2]

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]

Man Bites Dog is a strange, undeniably powerful hybrid of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and This is Spinal Tap; a jaw-dropper that takes your breath away with its scabrous mayhem, then replaces it with an uneasy chuckle. [5 Nov 1993, p.7]

This spoof fly-on-the-wall documentary is funny, scary, provocative, and profoundly disturbing...Purely on a gut level, it may offend; but as an exploration of voyeurism, it's one of the most resonant, caustic contributions to the cinema of violence since Peeping Tom. Read full review

An offbeat, darkly hilarious portrait. Read full review

Obviously not a movie for everyone, Man Bites Dog boasts graphic displays of murder and rape. There's very little of the human body -- inside or out -- that isn't shown at one time or another during the course of this movie. Nevertheless, if you do venture to see Man Bites Dog, you would have to be made out of stone to miss the visceral, sardonic impact of a highly-unusual film. Read full review

In addition to its views on the glamorization of serial murder, MAN BITES DOG offers a wicked send up of notoriously talky French filmmaking--the most unbelievable thing about the movie's narrative conceit isn't that the crew is calmly shooting a vicious serial murderer as he goes about his business, but that they've chosen to follow the unbearable Ben. His loathsome, self-absorbed monologues are torment worthy of the ninth circle of Hell, but with a cup of black coffee and a supply of smelly cigarettes he could pass at any cafe for a run-of-the-mill French intellectual. Read full review

It's one of the most violent, shocking and bitterly funny movies ever released. In terms of body count and graphic violence, it rivals ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer'' or, going back several years, Sam Peckinpah's grisly ''Straw Dogs.'' But that's half the story: Man Bites Dog also has method in its mayhem. By spoofing the trashy ''reality TV'' phenomenon -- a soul-numbing entertainment form that's found even greater popularity in Europe than the United States -- the film exposes the desensitizing effects of television violence, and questions the extent to which the media not only feeds the public hunger for violence, but ultimately creates it. [15 Jan 1993, p.C9]

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]

Man Bites Dog brings new meaning to the term guilty pleasure...You will by now be thinking that "Man Bites Dog" isn't easy to take. It isn't. But the viciousness of its violence is justified by the fact that it isn't exploitative. It's there to indict exploitation and complicity...It's "Sweeney Todd" filtered through "Spinal Tap," shock theater designed to remind us that we conveniently downplay our central role in the media's preoccupation with violence. [30 Apr 1993, p.50]

It’s a sick piece of work—I felt like a heel for watching it, yet I couldn’t look away, either. Read full review

Harrowing, visceral and definitely not for the squeamish, the fake documentary approach is an effective and unsettling tool, and while the film never quite reaches the horrific heights of John McNaughton's chilling Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, it is, for better or worse, difficult to forget. Read full review

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]

Certainly, disgust would be an appropriate response to this provocative but rather academic study of violence in the movies. Yet it's hard to work up much of a response of any kind to these casual terrors. Read full review

This isn't a movie to be taken too literally, given that a camera crew keeps on rolling in situations that would make even combat photographers bolt; as a result, the movie plays like one of those self-referential stunts that sometimes wow film festival audiences (as this one did). [24 Sept 1993, p.3D]

A grisly sick joke of a film that some will find funny, others simply appalling. On one level, it is an in-joke about movie making, since one reason given for Ben's rampage is the need to steal enough money to make the documentary. On another level, the film satirizes real-life television shows that purport to take viewers into the thick of the action. It suggests how profoundly the presence of the camera affects events, and thumbs its nose at the very notion of documentary objectivity. Read full review

The film's depicted cruelties (the rape and disembowelment of a woman, a pillow suffocation of a boy after Poelvoorde has chased the terrified tyke through the house) grossly overshadow their satiric purposes. Read full review

For all its cleverness it remains a dubious exercise...If none of this strikes you as very funny, even in the blackest of comedy, just wait for the rape scene later in the movie - not only is this not remotely funny, it is simply repulsive and indefensible whatever the context...Ultimately shallow and unconvincing and the result is a movie that is even more acutely disturbing than it was meant to be. [12 March 1993, p.11]

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]