Dogtooth

 In our attempt to make this an international celebration of horror films during the month of October in The Countdown To Halloween we head to Greece for this next film.  Kynodontas (the original translation of the title) is a 2009 film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  The film is hard to describe as it's not exactly horror, but it seems like one.  It's certainly a mind trip as I spent a great deal of the film looking over at Denise and commenting that it feels like we shouldn't be watching this.  Some of the film makes you uncomfortable but that is what makes this one interesting.  You can't look away. 

 So many times in the film I had to ask myself if I just saw what I saw, some things just seem "wrong", and they are, but they are supposed to be in order to give the viewer the inability to predict where any of the story could possibly go.  I like when a story can do that.  The film stars Christos Stergioglou and Michelle Valley as a married couple who live with their three adult (or nearly adult as I'm not sure how old the youngest is supposed to be) but very immature and naive children.  All of which is done on purpose due the way the parents raise them.  The children are played by Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni (who sadly passed away earlier this year at just 29 years of age), as the two daughters and Christos Passalis as their son.

Everyone does a good acting job wringing as much weirdness as possible out of each character.  While there isn't much in the way of gore (there are a couple scenes of violence but nothing we haven't seen before in other movies) with the ending being a little tough to watch (I saw it listed somewhere as one of the 50 most difficult to watch scenes in film history) and it does get bloody there.  The film has quite a few scenes of graphic sex in fact at least one scene is notable for it being unsimulated sex meaning they actually had sex while filming the scene.  So that can be awkward if you are watching it in mixed company.  I wouldn't watch this one with your Grandma is all I'm saying.  I'll give this one 3 and a half VHS tapes out of 5 where The Horror Honey wasn't as impressed with it.  She gave Dogtooth a 3 out of 5.