Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I avoided HOUNDDOG at Sundance this year. At first it was because I could see it a week later at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and that opened up a slot in my Sundance schedule to see a movie I couldn't see the next week. Then the word started coming out from the Sundance screenings that it was bad. Not just disappointing, not just pretty bad... but a trainwreck.

I knew Dakota Fanning was the star and that she got raped at some point in the movie. That's the buzz that has been coming from the movie since production. It has been called the Dakota Fanning Rape Movie more often than HOUNDDOG.

I expected the rape scene to be uncomfortable and hard to view, even after the filmmakers struck back at the criticism saying that the scene in question lasts all of 20 seconds and is shown mostly off camera. That is true, but I didn't expect to feel dirty watching the entire movie, where we get flashes of Fanning's underwear every other scene.

All of that would be okay if that was the intention... like Paul Schrader, how he likes to make you feel disgusting by the end of one of his films, to underline how horrible the events in the film are. But I think the filmmakers just didn't have a solid idea of what the hell they wanted to do.

I've said in the past that Fanning is a bit creepy, but I've never had anything less than total respect for her. She's incredibly smart and a great actress. Not just for her age, but for any age. She gets it. What's creepy is the maturity she conveys, an adult mind and ethic in a child's body. This movie, which should have been her best performance, is easily her worst.

There's nothing worse than seeing good actors trying to emote through a bad southern accent. We get a ton of that in this movie. Fanning herself, as well as David Morse as her dad and Robin Wright Penn. Piper Laurie is the only one who pulls it off as Fanning's overly protective religious grandmother... think of her as a slightly kinder version of her character from CARRIE.

The flick is set in the '50s, the deep south, and Fanning's character, Lewellen, has a roving father. There's also hints that he might do some bad things to her when he is home. In order to cope with her conflicting emotions about her father, Lewellen falls into the world of Rock N' Roll, specifically the music of Elvis. Which, as you can imagine, leads to some doubly uncomfortable hip gyrations when she performs Elvis wearing very little.

Lewellen has a friend, Afemo Omilami as Charles, a black dude who knows his snakes, spending his time making various venom antidotes and teaching Lewellen about the real roots of Rock N' Roll, including introducing her to Big Mama Thornton, the original singer of HOUNDDOG. In reality, this character is only in the movie to set up a few very telegraphed events for the end of the movie, including a break down scene with Fanning when she calls him a nigger and we get his speech on what a nigger really is.

This movie is trying to be really, really important and it just isn't. It's like writer/director Deborah Kampmeier knew she wanted to make a hard-hitting film that tackles these heavy topics... racism, child alienation and rape, but just didn't know how to do it. Everything is so surface and so cliche that you can't ever take the movie as seriously as it takes itself.

In fact, the movie isn't even entertainingly bad until the David Morse character randomly gets struck by lightning and spends the rest of the movie a mongoloid. No shit. And yes, it is funny. Sometimes they're going for the humor, most of the time they're not. I particularly like the part where Morse gives himself a hair cut because Fanning got one and he wants to be like her, giving him a shitty Prince Valiant cut for the last 40 minutes of the movie.

With all the talk, even if it is mostly negative, around this movie I'd be very surprised if it didn't get picked up eventually, but I will be surprised if it gets any sort of decent theatrical release. Expect to see this one on the Blockbuster shelves sooner or later.

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com