"The award for Best Canine Actor in a Supporting Role goes to...."

The Academy totally missed this one back in 1982.

On my catch-up quest to watch all of Dario Argento's films, I've just come across one of the best canine actors that cinema has ever produced. In the Italian horror icon's Tenebre (1982), there's this totally badass sequence where this dog-shit-crazy Doberman randomly chases after one of the doomed female characters, and this bitch (assuming its a female dog, for the word-usage-here sake) stops at nathan. What makes the scene so wonderful is that Tenebre has nothing to do with killer dogs, at all. It's about an author on a book-tour in Rome whose latest hit murder mystery novel has inspired some psycho to kill a slew of Italian girls in ways written in the book, also titled Tenebre.



Tenebre, this actual movie, is a hands-down winner. Not as stellar as Argento's Suspiria, and mere inches behind Deep Red in coolness, but still victorious. The way the movie is paced, you know when a girl is going to be hacked and slashed instantly, because Argento lingers on an otherwise-insignificant female character long enough to ensure she'll be dead within ten minutes. Being that I sign on to Argento films to watch beautiful people die even-more-beautiful, exquisitely-staged deaths, this is a good thing. Gets right down to business. As it should be.

So this dog in Tenebre serves absolutely no purpose other than provide some extra tension, and that it sure does. The first victim is bothered and chased down by a dirty hobo in a similar fashion to how this dog gives this girl the bad-business, and that's the only aspect of this sequence that rang somewhat purposeful, to possibly beat home the idea of "this girl is totally fucked, so don't worry if she escapes this first assailant." Indeed.

It also helps in bulk that the dog actor here is dynamite. Relentless, athletic, menacing. You'd think this chick was packing some Snausages in her pants pockets.

Enjoy:



And after surviving all of that, she ends up catching a couple axe-swings into her gut five minutes later. Should've just let the dog use her for rawhide instead.