Like Dogs – Movie Review
94 Minutes, Not Rated
Written and Directed by Randy Van Dyke
Synopsis:
Abducted, and treated like animals, 2 university students are unwilling participants in a behavioral experiment gone horribly wrong. It gets personal when the pair learn they’ve each been specifically targeted. Once people start dying it’s a race to escape and survive.
Sigh…
When I started this one, I immediately thought it was just going to be torture porn, but it was more like torture Cinemax (Google “Skinemax” if you’re not old enough to remember that phenomenon).
Well, Like Dogs is, in fact, kind of torturous, for both the actors and the audience. It’s a psychological manipulation movie, where we don’t know who people are, or who they aren’t.
Writer-director Randy Van Dyke (which sounds like a porn name, actually…) makes the mistake of telling us who people are too soon, and if he doesn’t actually say it, then he makes it blindingly obvious, so there’s no real tension in the build up to the revelation.
The final act is damnably predictable, up to and including the profession of love from one “unexpected” character to another, which, of course, goes horribly awry.
The performances range from meh to good (the good being Annabel Barrett playing an Eliza Dushku-esque… well… you’ll see), with all the tropey blocks ticked off.
A tolerable 90-ish minute runtime isn’t a complete waste, but there are far better films to spend that time on.
Like Dogs is available digitally beginning today, just in time for horror movie season.
Like Dogs stars Annabel Barrett, Ignacyo Matynia, Ryan Tran, Shay Denison, Kate Dore, and Nicole Bleacher.
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