Mad Dogs is definitely one of those movies where its subjective quality goes up in direct proportion to the viewer's level of intoxication. And there must have been some really good drugs at work when they made this over in Great Britain.
Theoretically, the movie is about Rabbie Burns (Iain Fraser), a schizophrenic who's just being released from his treatment program. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't last a day before he starts hearing voices again. These voices, however, claim not to be hallucinations. Rather, they're working with a pigman who shows up on Rabbie's TV and tells him to stop the American government from using a teleporting explosive to blow up a planet hundreds of light years away from Earth, or alien forces will reduce Earth to a burned out cinder. That leads to Rabbie, his girlfriend Narendra (Indira Varma) and his homeless, saxophone playing buddy Jimmy Joyce (Paul Barber) running to and fro around London, encountering a bizarrely theatrical British cop, three Men in Black from America and conversing with The Supreme Being (Jonathan Pryce) over a hotel television, before the dead rise from the grave and decide to hang out at Rabbie's apartment. Oh, and all of the dogs in Great Britain have caught a deadly strain of Mad Cow disease and are being destroyed.
Somebody was smoking something when they came up with that. I've watched British costume dramas, British crime flicks, British war/colonial movies and more but I'm not really sure what genre of British film-making Mad Dogs fits into. The closest thing I can compare it to is a 90 minute long Monty Python sketch where one absurd situation is piled on top of another without any real payoff at the end. None of the actors are trying to play things seriously, yet the film isn't funny either. It's quirky and eccentric and maybe there's a bunch of British cultural references being touched on throughout the movie, but to me it's the equivalent of a bunch of American teenagers getting hopped up on cold medicine and trying to make a movie one afternoon with their parents' old video camera.
Mad Dogs is also filled with as much profanity as any movie not featuring a concert performance by Eddie Murphy in a leather suit. There's almost a Tourette's Syndrome quality to the dialog, with the F word joining "I" and "the" as the most commonly used words in the English language.
If you're looking to get severely drunk or stoned and want to watch something that will leave a deep impression on your malleable psyche Mad Dogs is definitely a good candidate. If you're sober, though, you'd probably enjoy anything else more even a movie starring Pauly Shore and Steven Seagal as twin brothers separated a birth who reunite to save their sister's ostrich ranch from the Albanian mob.
Theoretically, the movie is about Rabbie Burns (Iain Fraser), a schizophrenic who's just being released from his treatment program. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't last a day before he starts hearing voices again. These voices, however, claim not to be hallucinations. Rather, they're working with a pigman who shows up on Rabbie's TV and tells him to stop the American government from using a teleporting explosive to blow up a planet hundreds of light years away from Earth, or alien forces will reduce Earth to a burned out cinder. That leads to Rabbie, his girlfriend Narendra (Indira Varma) and his homeless, saxophone playing buddy Jimmy Joyce (Paul Barber) running to and fro around London, encountering a bizarrely theatrical British cop, three Men in Black from America and conversing with The Supreme Being (Jonathan Pryce) over a hotel television, before the dead rise from the grave and decide to hang out at Rabbie's apartment. Oh, and all of the dogs in Great Britain have caught a deadly strain of Mad Cow disease and are being destroyed.
Somebody was smoking something when they came up with that. I've watched British costume dramas, British crime flicks, British war/colonial movies and more but I'm not really sure what genre of British film-making Mad Dogs fits into. The closest thing I can compare it to is a 90 minute long Monty Python sketch where one absurd situation is piled on top of another without any real payoff at the end. None of the actors are trying to play things seriously, yet the film isn't funny either. It's quirky and eccentric and maybe there's a bunch of British cultural references being touched on throughout the movie, but to me it's the equivalent of a bunch of American teenagers getting hopped up on cold medicine and trying to make a movie one afternoon with their parents' old video camera.
Mad Dogs is also filled with as much profanity as any movie not featuring a concert performance by Eddie Murphy in a leather suit. There's almost a Tourette's Syndrome quality to the dialog, with the F word joining "I" and "the" as the most commonly used words in the English language.
If you're looking to get severely drunk or stoned and want to watch something that will leave a deep impression on your malleable psyche Mad Dogs is definitely a good candidate. If you're sober, though, you'd probably enjoy anything else more even a movie starring Pauly Shore and Steven Seagal as twin brothers separated a birth who reunite to save their sister's ostrich ranch from the Albanian mob.