Netflix Fix -- Man Bites Dog

Now here's a classic case of "right movie, wrong time." If I had seen Man Bites Dog back when it was originally released in 1993 (having been made in '92), I'm sure it would've flipped my wig something fierce. By that point, there really hadn't been a film like it, one that shines the sunlight on media and its role within violence and cruelty. How it indirectly is a cause, rather than a deterrent. And the unrepentable things that transpire in the flick would've certainly caused my jaw to drop a bit, and had me leaving the movie in a sense of anger and repulsion.

But alas, it's 15 years after the fact, and tons of "media is an accomplice to evil, not a well-intended broadcaster" films have been made in Man Bites Dog's corpse-ridden wake. Just off the top of my dome, there's Serial Mom and Natural Born Killers, and I know there's tons more if I dug deeper into the noggin here. Surely, these subsequent films were inspired by Man Bites Dog, even if the filmmakers won't admit it. Hell, Natural Born Killers turns out to be a pretty straightforward jacking of this film, with the whole plotline of Robert Downey Jr.'s reporter's obsession with Mickey and Mallory and his devotion to recording their crimes on camera.

That leads me to the plot, and point, of Man Bites Dog, a "found footage"/first-person-shot film made in Belgium, spoken in French, and all shot in stark black-and-white. For added effect, I'm sure. This ragtag team of low-budget-operating, ill-intentioned documentarians---Andre, Remy, and Patrick---are shooting a docu about Benoit, a ruthless and ice-cold-blooded serial killer. The filmmakers' intentions of doing so aren't really explained, which didn't bother me. At first. As the flick progresses, Benoit is revealed to be quite a charismatic guy, full of energy and jokes, spewing random knowledge at will (offering insight into the neighborhood's shady real estate practices one moment, and explaining the mating rituals of pigeons the next), and he's quite the familyman, held in high,loving regard by his grandpa, mother, and soft-spoken girlfriend, none of whom seem to be aware of his murderous kicks.



Kicks largely consisting of blowing people's brains out at point blank range, wrapping their bodies up and dumping the lifeless fleshy-patches into a ravine. Man Bites Dog isn't short on appalling scenes, the most gut-wrenching for me being this sequence where they dupe a sweet elderly lady into inviting the film crew into her apartment under the guise of a local news team, sitting down for an on-couch interview with her and then giving her a gun-to-the--temple shock so unexpected and jolting that she dies of a heart attack. Such a tactic saves Benoit a bullet, he reasons with a giggle. It's a tough scene to watch, you're full aware that this old woman is in for an unpleasant surprise, but you don't know when exactly she'll get it, and when she does, its just as much of a "Oh shit" reaction that she must feel. Except, of course, that the viewer isn't deceased as a result.

For the first 75 or so minutes of the film's 92-min span, Man Bites Dog is actually a darker-than-charcoal comedy, mining laughs from Benoit's goofy brand of humor and wit, and the playful interaction he develops with the filmmakers in the midst of endless murder. There's one particular scene that had me laughing outloud, even, where they're getting boozed up in a local pub after a night of death and mayhem. It's cleverly structured, lulling you into a false sense of comraderie and tolerability with these scumbags, only to pimpslap you across the face with what follows. In their drunken stupors, they break into an apartment and engage in a bit of A Clockwork Orange-esque "in out, in out." Which is rape, for the uninitiated. Only, here its a gang-rape as the poor girl's lover is held frozen at gunpoint. And then the camera cuts to the aftermath/morning-after, with our villains passed out drunk on the apartment's floor as the male lover's lies with his brains blown out in the sink and the raped woman has her intestines and other innards exposed, gutted on the kitchen table. It's pretty devastating.

With all this praise I'm tossing the film's way, its probably to be assumed that I'm in love with Man Bites Dog. Well, I'm not. I like it, sure. But overall, I can't help but be a tad disappointed, mostly due to all the pre-viewing hype I've read, and all of the fawning praise I've seen critically. I agree that its a well-made and effective piece of bleak satire, but like I hinted at in the beginning of my writing, my being-in-2008 is an Achilles heel here. The media satire attempted in Man Bites Dog is nothing new for me. I know that the media is to blame for much of society's violence, gladly pointing a camera at destruction rather than stepping in to help, just as the documentarians here standy-by and record as Benoit shoots people and strangles old ladies so viciously that their dentures pop out from the force. It's nothing revelatory for me. And I wish it was, because again, I do like the film. It just didn't wallop me in ways I was hoping.

Not to mention, I have a bit of a problem with the documentarians themselves, or their "characters." Where as the killer, Benoit, is rather nicely fleshed out and given tons of gravitas, our two main filmmakers---Remy and Andre---are never given any real sense of purpose. As in, why in the hell are they making this "film" in the first place? To capture the doings of a mad man, I'd assume. Fine, but then why do they remain so obsessed with it, and even willingly begin to participate in the slaughter? Because they're seduced by Benoit's emotionless demeanor, perhaps? Maybe.



Early on, they enter this huge abandoned factory building as Benoit is chasing a would-be-victim who has managed to escape on foot, wounded. Inside, bullets fly at our group out of nowhere, striking Patrick, the sound-man, in the head and punching his clock, for good. After Benoit terminates the assailant, Remy begins kicking the assailant's dead-body while crying. An act of vengeance, if you will. Benoit stops him, though, saying how revenge is an addictive drug, nearly impossible kick its fix once experience from the avenger's POV for the first time. So this is made to be the turning point for Remy, at least. The moment where he begins veering toward the darkside. But he's shown no sense of humanity or morality in the first place, so how am I supposed to buy his whole "becoming as evil as Benoit now" character arch? Just didn't register for me, unfortunately.

The truly-powerful moments in Man Bites Dog are enough to sway me towards the appreciative and admiration-filled side in the end, though. The naturalistic and gleeful insanity seen when Benoit asks the soundman to put the microphone up to a man's neck as he snaps it, giving the "CRUUNCH!" sound a bit more mojo. The despicable scene where Benoit suffocates a boy no-older-than-eight years old with a pillow, as Remy holds down the boys and arms at Benoit's request. The way that, now numb to visualized murder and having laughed uncontested as Benoit has joyfully done it every other time, the viewer chuckles at a snide remark a distraught Benoit makes when he discovers his mother is dead, having fallen victim to Italian thugs who have a score to settle with Benoit and have jammed a broom up his mother's ass--and a flute up his girlfriend's ass (she's a musician, see, while his mother owns and maintains a cornerstore with her trusty broom). Killing both. You're laughing during Benoit's darkest moment, mainly because you've seen he and his new friends get a hearty giggle out of killing other people's loved ones time and time again.



Man Bites Dog isn't an easy film to shake out of your thoughts. I'm still, at this very moment of typing, deliberating between "did I love it?" or "did I just respect its conviction but ultimately feel a bit letdown?" I can definitely say, without any doubt, that the film's ending is a total score in my book. Well-executed, and totally fitting to everything that's come before it. One of those endings where you think, "Yes, that's exactly how this movie should've ended. Nicely done, filmmakers!"

My frustrations only stem from something that comes as a result of having seen the much-more-visceral and harder-hitting (in my opinion, at least) Irreversible and Cannibal Holocaust, both films that are frequently mentioned in the same "controversial cult classic" vein as Man Bites Dog. But like both of those other flicks, undoubtedly, Man Bites Dog is a movie I'm very glad to have finally watched in its totality.

**Sidenote: during the aforementioned funny scene where they're getting sloppy drunk-as-skunks in the bar, Benoit introduces them to a drinking game called "Dead Baby Boy." Charming name, right? It's a serial killer explaining it, so bear with it. But how it's played is....you pour a glass 3/4-ful with gin & tonic, and then you take a piece of string and tie together a sugar cube to an olive. You then drop the olive-cube-tie into the glass, and watch as they rise back up to the glasses' surfaces. Whose ever olive hits the brim first has to drink the entire glass as one shot and then also buy the next round of Dead Baby Boys.

If my friends and I were depraved killers and sick fucks, I'd propose we play this the next time we're at Green Rock Tap & Grill. But we're not, so I won't.