Friday, June 1, 2012

"An all new movie that FINALLY asks the question your mom and dad are too afraid to ask"


Could anything be stranger than Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain? The monsters of Everything Is Terrible! seem to think so. The DVD's case asks this post's titular question: "Why not remake Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 classic The Holy Mountain out of dog movies?" Well, open your eyes, puppies! Because apparently, somebody did. 

Doggie Woggiez! Poochie Woochiez! is one of the strangest fucking films I've experienced, and very much a reflection of 21st century aesthetics. I think it's appropriate that the members of EIT! - those curators of VHS purgatory - have created such an...interesting homage to the creator of the first midnight movie. If anyone on the net could be linked to chaotic cult appeal, I think that EIT! takes the cake. 







Doggie Woggiez! was constructed by suturing together hundreds of clips featuring dogs, and other dog related footage. The film more or less adhere's to The Holy Mountain's plot (the main emphasis here on "less"), but it is also an exploration into the predictability (and complete stupidity) of the animal feature film. To visualize this claim, imagine every movie you've ever seen that features a dog and all of the tropes that these films entail (the doggie death scene, the dog-doo joke, dogs being anthropomorphized, etc, etc). When taken out of context, these images take on entirely new meanings and can be used to manufacture new narratives.

Found footage is interlaced with Frankensteinian, dream-like sequences (forays into photoshop), that sort of drive the narrative. However, as bizarre as these synthetic images can get, the film's raw footage often supersedes them in strangeness.


As is the case here...

If The Holy Mountain represents a drug induced spiritual exploration on the part of Jodorowsky, then Doggie Woggiez! is a sporadic, LSD nightmare. The former is symbolic and sublime, the latter, a messy stream-of-consciousness filtered through magnetic tape.  

I think it's interesting to contrast the scale of these films. The Holy Mountain had a budget of one million dollars (before inflation), and was backed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Doggie Woggiez! was most likely budgetless and extremely DIY. 






Near the end of the film, we are treated to this monolithic tower of dogdom. I did some suturing of my own to assemble this image. Its components were constantly in motion, so the finished product is a bit rough.




EIT!'s take on the ending is pretty ambitious as well. The camera pulls out from a monitor, revealing the artificiality of the film's construction. The ending hits pretty hard, but not as hard as Jodorowsky's ending does. It's my opinion though, that the effect is quite different here, probably because it was intended to be different. When I view the ending of Doggie Woggiez! it seems to me that its editors are hammering home the exhibitionist overtones of their film. It's as though they are saying "look at us, look what we have created. We've taken what you've forgotten and made it our own."

I am not about to defend Doggie Woggiez!'s value as a political document, but wish to emphasize its uniqueness as an experiment in editing.


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