Rottweiler (2004) * (out of 4) THE TERMINATOR, CUJO and a few political thrillers are all thrown together by cult director Yuzna and the end result is pretty bad. Set in Spain in 2018, an American prisoner escapes from prison only to be chased by a sadistic rottweiler who he eventually kills. What he doesn't know is that the dog is a cyborg and keeps coming back to life and will kill whoever gets in its way. Yeah, that's right now. I find it pretty funny that this flick was released in Japan as TERMINATOR 2018 but no matter the title this thing here is a real stinker. It's sad but I knew this film was dead on arrival during the opening prison escape as the special effects were so poorly done that you knew things weren't going to get any better. What shocked me was how much useless plot was in this thing because we've got countless genres going against one another and for the life of me I can't figure out what the director was trying to do. There's certainly a political side to this film and none of it ever makes sense. The American, Dante, is trying to get back to his girlfriend after the two accidentally entered Spain where he would eventually be held captive while she gets sexually assaulted by a madman (Paul Naschy). The political nature of the prison camp and everything else is just pointless and adds absolutely nothing to the film. Even if this political stuff works only fifty-percent that wouldn't be good enough because the horror side of this is also quite poor. The dog is never scary because you can tell when a puppet is being used and his steel teeth just aren't frightening. The entire chase of the dog and the American contains no energy, no flow and is simply boring all together. I'm really not sure why the dog wouldn't just go after his main target or why he needed to kill everyone else around him but at least the film didn't add another subplot trying to give the dog some sort of personality. The idea of a cyborg dog is pretty stupid but this film makes it a lot worse than it should be. Even the performances are all rather forgettable with the exception of horror legend Naschy who gets a decent sized role here.

'Relatively speaking' means in comparison to all of the films he's directed. Yuzna is not a seminal horror film director but he does have a certain style and following, and is not merely a hack. For example, a few of his films can stand up with seminal horror directors such as Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and George Romero, and ROTTWEILER is one that can.It's not a straight-out, routinely linear-plotted opus, but rather asks the viewer to follow a storyline that jumps through past and present. There is a purpose for this, that mostly being to maintain an intrigue about how the events leading to the chase of the bionic rottweiler and the hunted man came to be, and how the rottweiler itself became a killing machine.There are also plot points that need the viewer to exercise some mental abilities to follow, and in doing so reward the viewer with a more inclusive experience rather than that of being a 'couch potato' merely as a recipient of programmed emotional effects. These are the folks who complained that they couldn't understand what was going on.As a point of example for this, it's shown in subtle ways that the bionic rottweiler tracks the hunted man by his scent and the scent of his blood. Anyone who gets this scent on them becomes a victim as well, or if they are between the dog and the man. Those who are not do not get attacked. But the viewers who are looking only for simple plot devices and completely explained maneuvers won't get these subtleties.This is Yuzna's most interesting horror film to date and the most enjoyable for me, and as I feel it is his best so far, I've called it his masterpiece. Plus it does have the gore that we've come to expect from him.

Southern Spain in 2018. Dante, an American who has been held in detention since he infiltrated a group of illegal immigrants as part of a game, makes an escape from a prison van & heads across the Spanish countryside in order to find his girlfriend who was with him when he was arrested. Standing in his path for freedom is a rottweiler guard dog that has been augmented with cyborg parts. As Dante meets various people in his way, the dog ruthlessly kills those people, trying to track down & kill Dante.Brian Yuzna gained valuable horror street cred in 1985 when he produced Stuart Gordon's classic zombie flick RE-ANIMATOR. Since then, Yuzna has maintained a career making horror films, including two Re-Animator sequels. Rottweiler, a science fiction film based on a Spanish political thriller (& indeed written by that book's author), is probably the strangest film to have come out of Yuzna's recent career – although it might not exactly match the intense weirdness of Yuzna's oddball comedy Society.As far as Terminator templaters go, Rottweiler is the strangest one around – mainly due to having the killer cyborg being of the canine variety. That said, the film is extremely thinly-plotted, so much so that you can't get much genre interest out of it. The visual effects are really patchy – the cyborg dog is played by everything from a real dog to an animatronic dog puppet to a stuffed dog to CGI & so on. Most of these effects don't always look convincing but that is not really the issue here.In the original novel, the dog was an allegory of abuse inflicted by a totalitarian regime but here the motivation for the dog's attacks is almost nonexistent. All we get is the dog's owner – a businessman (played with cheerful cruelty by Paul Naschy) who seems like the Spanish version of Scott Morrison (for those who don't know, Morrison was the Australian Liberal government's border protection minister, a hard-headed & secretive man whose tough policies have resulted in a ruthless crackdown on illegal immigrants coming to the country), freely abusing the prisoners under his custody. On the acting front, the lead actor William Miller is terrible – he makes stupid mistakes all the time & is not believable as the escaped prisoner. Naschy is a relative show-stealer as the villainous businessman who detained Miller & the dog's gory attacks are probably worth a once-over afternoon viewing for jaded Terminator fans.

Typically awful Yuzna exercise, this time mining the "monster dog" genre having this human-eating, bloodthirsty mutt chasing convict Dante(William Miller)through this totalitarian country. He is bitten twice by it, but somehow, despite how others are torn to shreds, escapes his clutches. This film embarrassingly finds numerous ways, when there shouldn't be none, for Dante to constantly evade dire harm. It's essentially a series of near-death scenarios as he is caught by one prison guard with cowboy boots(?!)who was in possession of the rottweiler, is pretty much raped by some former-whore named Alyah(Paulina Gálvez), who becomes lunch,with a daughter , runs into three drug-runners who are interested in the boots he stole from the prison guard he blows away, and finally makes it to this metallic city(which resembles Pittsburgh or Chicago) where prostitution runs supreme with constant trafficking of drugs and narcotics. Dante's memory has been dodgy since beaten to a pulp by the sickening leader, Kufard(Paul Naschy out of all people..inspired casting, I'm sure) of this country's prison unit, or whatever it is, and he pursues the love he was separated from when circumstances brought them apart. There's this game called Infiltration where certain products of wealth(Dante and Ula) see if they can escape dangerous, patrolled waters..whatever. Dante spends most of his quest searching for Ula(Irene Montalà)when he isn't barely surviving the killer dog out for blood.There are certain repressed memories Dante is trying to retrieve and it concerns what happened that night he and Ula were caught by Kufard. This also concerns the reason the rottweiler is beyond mortal..it had some sort of scrape with Dante resulting in it's skeletal structure(..and teeth) being changed partially into metal which means it can rip people apart for the hell of it without anyone doing much to him. He's pretty much a robotic killing machine. This film contains some graphic neck attacks among other flesh ripping from the killer mutt. Yuzna shows it pulling away vital organs from the torsos of victims, chomping on the skin around the skeletal remains of human meat, etc.