Yours truly is one of them sour people who's incredibly annoyed by the trend of inexperienced singers (mostly hip-hop & pop stars) getting lead roles in films just because they're immensely popular among teenage audiences. Although this mainly happens nowadays, lame directors have apparently always been recruiting music idols to make their insignificant movies look a little more appealing. No one less than shock-rocker Alice Cooper is the main attraction of this terribly inept yet hilariously amusing werewolf-vehicle, directed by the same guy who brought us the legendary bad flick "Troll 2". "Monster Dog" is not much better than "Troll 2", though. It's poorly scripted, unimaginably cheesy and almost half of the film is pure padding since there wasn't enough material to fill up a whole screenplay. Cooper's music video for "Identity Crisis" is repeated not once but twice, and there's another entire clip in the middle section of the movie. Alice Cooper stars as surprise a successful artist who takes his whole entourage with him for a trip to the region where he grew up in order to shoot a new music video. The sinister place brings back traumatic memories, however, as superstitious locals lynched Vince's father because they thought he was a werewolf. When mutilated corpses are discovered once again, the locals believe Vince is a werewolf too and begin to hunt down the entire group. Don't even consider watching "Monster Dog" in case you have little tolerance for lousy acting and horrible dubbing jobs. The dialogs are all irritatingly monotonous and entire cast is wooden as hell. Our good pal Claudio Fragasso (Clyde Anderson) doesn't even attempt to build up a suspenseful atmosphere, but at least there's some blood and delightfully phony werewolf-mutations to enjoy. The make-up effects are laughable and about the opposite of shocking, but hey, at least they provide the movie with a handful of memorable shlock-sequences, like the shotgun-head kill. Some of the interior settings as well as the fog-enshrouded landscapes look effectively eerie, but they're largely ignored in favor of the hip music sequences. "Monster Dog" is recommended to either fans of brainless & campy 80's horror, or die-hard admirers of Alice Cooper. This last group is probably responsible for the rather big number of 10/10 ratings.
Review of Monster Dog
