White God

White God (Feher Isten) (2014)

Runtime: 121 long agonizing minutes

Directed by: Kornel Mundruczo

Starring: Zsofia Psotta, Sandor Zsoter, Lili Horvath, Lili Monori, Szabolcs Thuroczy

From: Several Hungarian, German, and Swedish companies, but this is mainly a Hungarian movie

Here is another foreign film from me. It's mainly Hungarian and I've known of it for awhile. I explain the backstory about it and everything else in my Letterboxd review below... note that I am not a fan of this at all:

Awhile back on various sites I heard all about this Hungarian movie and how it was about dogs finally having enough of humans' bark and turning against them and I thought it sounded odd but I did not reject the movie on the spot. I heard a wild mix of opinions about the film and I had no idea what to think. Thankfully, Netflix Instant threw us a bone and put it on their service, so I took a bite at it and well, I'll be doggone but this was simply horrible, and not even all the cute doggies-or how the filmmakers used real life hounds-could save it. I could use many terms containing foul language; I'll just keep it clean and say this was pretentious twaddle and nonsense.

I say that the whole plot was stupid and did not make a lick of sense. I am not even talking about how lead dog Hagen is able to lead that uprising to begin with. I don't want to try and untangle that Gordian knot and try to figure it out. I am talking about the plot as a whole, and how there's suddenly a tax on mongrels done by “the State” as they want purebred only so everyone gets rid of mutts. That makes zero sense, even as a metaphor or allegory or satire, apparently against those that are xenophobic. It's just asinine. This movie honestly screwed the pooch, and that is even with nice performances by the twin dogs that played Hagen. They were certainly better actors than most of the humans.

Then, there's how most of the adults you see here are irredeemable; I mean, just thoroughly unpleasant characters, evil in the most ham-fisted lazy ways imaginable. One of them might as well have been Snidely Whiplash and tied a dog on a set of train tracks. I did not enjoy watching these people and no matter the revenge that you figuratively or literally saw from the dogs, I was not left with the feeling that I spent my two hours (talk about an overlong film; it was a ruff experience) in a wise manner. I love dogs and it's nice to see them on screen... but even there this movie was insufferable. This is definitely no Rise of the Planet of the Apes (the movie that this is always compared to) or Samuel Fuller's final American film White Dog, which had to be the only reason why this was even called White God. I've never reviewed White Dog here, but while it's not a 5 star classic it's still better than this dog turd of a motion picture.

Then, there's bad filmmaking on hand, from how the camera shakes about too much-yes, this had damn shaky-cam!-to how they did the pointless thing of showing part of the ending at the beginning; why was this even done? What a two paws down moment. I don't know why people rate this so highly, but I'll just chalk it up to something that I'll never understand-if they were in heat over this, that is fine-and I'll just bury the thoughts of ever having seen this. I mean, I'd rather get neutered than watch this overblown wankery ever again!