LIST CANDIDATE: DOGGIEWOGGIEZ! POOCHIEWOOCHIEZ! (2012)

Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. Please make any comments on the official Certified Weird entry.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Commodore Gilgamesh, Ghoul Skool

FEATURING: None (found footage and movie clips, although you can catch glimpses of faded celebrities like Tim Allen and Gary Busey)

PLOT: 55 minutes of 1 to 5 second clips of strange and funny dog footage from movies and

Still from Doogiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez!

videotapes, arranged into a psychedelic montage that loosely follows the plot of Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s surrealist epic The Holy Mountain.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: You would think a “remake” of The Holy Mountain made up from found footage of dog movies would easily qualify as one of the 366 weirdest movies of all time. There are only two obstacles to adding Doggiewoggiez! to the List immediately. One is a philosophical issue: since this is just a compilation of clips—albeit one put together with wit and skill—with no original material save for a few kaleidoscopic canine collages, does it even meet the definition of a “movie”? The second objection is more practical than philosophical: if Doggiewoggiez! is in fact a “movie,” it potentially fails “the grandma test.” When considering a movie for the List, I imagine showing the movie to my grandma (God rest her soul); if at any time during the imaginary screening she leaves the room, muttering under her breath, “that was weird,” I add the film to the List. Now, I didn’t show this movie to my dead grandma, but I did show it to a living grandma—and she loved it and thought it was cute. Can a movie be truly weird if dog-loving grandmas find it adorable?

COMMENTS: A startling indictment of the indignities desperate Hollywood producers will inflict upon man’s best friend in the name of cheap entertainment, Doggiewoogiez! features every terrible sub-Disney talking dog movie in which an uncomprehending pooch is forced to recite a horrible pun acting against a slumming Dave Thomas, Fred Willard, or Cuba Gooding, Jr. And it’s not just the major Hollywood players that are into abusing the long-suffering fidos, either, as Doggiewoggiez! collects plenty of examples of amateurs touting undignified forms of dog massage, puppy training, and owners posing nude with their pooches. The consortium at Everything is Terrible! bring us morphing mutt montages of lifted legs, doggie-style rutting, and bitches attacking crotches. Watching this compilation you’ll see more footage of dogs surfing or riding dolphins than you ever thought existed, along with vintage racist dogs, dogs in sports, dogs going to heaven… well, you get the picture. It’s a non-stop assault of pop-culture canine iconography, often trippily manipulated (where else but in Doggiewoggiez! “The Dog Molecule” segment will you see a dog puffing on a tiny duplicate pipe version of its own head, that’s also puffing on itself?) And, as promised, the organization of this dog show does mimic The Holy Mountain, from the opening scene of “ritual” poodle shaving to the “zoom back, camera!” fourth-wall smashing finale. Much of Jodorwosky’s music and dialogue is slyly integrated into the compilation; the line “your sacrifice has completed my sanctuary of one thousand testicles” is followed by a dog breeder observing “the more testicles you cut off, the fewer dog fights there are.” There’s no deep meaning to the cross-breeding of Mexican surrealists with preposterous puppy clips, other than that Everything is Terrible! (correctly) thinks that both are cool, and that the mixture is uniquely bizarre. Picking out the clever correspondences is a fun bonus for those intimately familiar with Mountain, but it’s not necessary to enjoy the bow-wow barrage of barking mad dog clips.

Doggiewoggiez! runs 55 minutes, which is about the perfect length to keep it from overstaying its welcome. Fortunately, there’s almost 3 hours (!) of “extra” material on the disc, so you won’t feel ripped off. The supplemental features are divided into three separate categories. “2 Minute Movies” are expertly compressed versions of ten truly horrible films like Revenge of the Red Baron, featuring a wheelchair-bound Mickey Rooney haunted by a remote controlled toy airplane possessed by the spirit of the WWI ace. “Best Of” contains a selection of demonically bad found-footage discoveries including several accidentally frightening Christian puppet shows (and, to show that bad taste knows no denomination, scenes from a terrible Jewish children’s video called “Torah Tots” featuring a character who promises to float around the world vacuuming up all the Jews and depositing them in Israel). And, just so you won’tbe shocked when you come across it, we’ll mention that hidden inside the ten minute “Mondo Bigfoot” compilation collected from the 1970s Sasquatch craze are the fake hardcore porn scenes from the Bigfoot rapist oddity The Geek (1971) (grandma would not approve). Finally, there’s a special section devoted to “Music Videos,”of which the most famous number is Tim Curry’s rendition of “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” from The Worst Witch; the strangest item, however, is “Don’t Do Drugs,” in which a teenager in a skimpy black bikini falls asleep on a beach, dreams about four much younger kids doing an anti-drug rap while imagining herself buying smack and being arrested for vagrancy, then wakes up to a guy offering her a bottle of booze. Because of copyright issues (the main feature constitutes fair use but some of the supplements are problematic), new copies of Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! is unlikely to be sold through legitimate retail sites. Look for used copies or buy directly from Everything is Terrible! while supplies last.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie could easily coast on the ridiculous amount of work that went into realizing its weird conceit… Seemingly thousands of videos ranging from the obscure to the I-wish-it-were-obscure (Tim Allen’s public nude scene in The Shaggy Dog) have been shredded like the morning paper into seconds-long fragments, and then meticulously sequenced into a variation on Jodorowsky’s psychedelic-surrealist masterpiece that conveys pretty much every memorable image in the film…”–Benjamin Pearson, Tiny Mix Tapes (DVD)