Review: Doghouse

Jake West, director of Doghouse, has been working in the indie horror field for some time. Beginning with 1998's Razor Blade Smile, West has done a number of shorts revolving around horror films and their creators, along with his own work in features. It's evident in watching Doghouse that this is no first time outing, and the camera stays busy without being intrusive or calling too much attention to itself. Despite the schlocky poster and the overdone premise involving zombies, there are some things here that make Doghouse a better-than-average expenditure of horror fan time.

We begin with friends Vince (Stephen Graham, Boardwalk Empire's Al Capone), Neil (Danny Dyer), Mikey (Noel Clarke, Mickey in the latest Dr. Who incarnation), Graham (Emil Marwa), Matt (Lee Ingleby), and Patrick (Keith-Lee Castle) setting off for a holiday in the countryside following Vince's divorce. The boys assemble for a weekend of debauchery in a tiny village called Moodley, where the women outnumber the men four-to-one. Along for the ride is their driver, Candy, nee Ruth (Christina Cole), a cute blond that upsets the testosterone-fueled intentions of the group by not being the male driver they'd anticipated.

Once in Moodley, the boys discover that the town appears to be deserted; that is until the women of the town show up with bad complexions and a taste for man meat. The boys are thankfully quick to realize that the ladies of the village are far less interested in naughty behavior and far more concerned with which one of the men will be their next meal. Along the way they find the only other living male, a soldier named Gavin (Terry Stone) ordered to eliminate the zombie-girl infestation.

All of this sounds fairly routine in terms of the local zombie outbreak met by misfits, which, of course, it is. The movie reminded me quite a lot of the other woman-infected-guys-have-to-sort-it-out British flick called Lesbian Vampire Killers, and it strikes a similar tone of humor mixed with the blood. What places this film above that one is the fact that the filmmakers seemed to have a statement to make here about the age-old battle between the sexes, rather than simply using the zombified women as the set-up for gags. I will make no effort to convince you that this is a highbrow film... it most certainly is not. It is, though, a movie with something to say.

Neil, the womanizer of the group, is representative of the chauvinistic nature of the primitive male, while others around him are more evolved in one form or another. Much is made of the fact that Vince was quite the party animal prior to his marriage and subsequent divorce, though that is simply told and never shown, which would have been nice. When things go from bad to worse, Vince is the one to deliver the message of the movie, which, to be frank, is a bit muddied by the actions of the characters, and I'm left to wonder what the meaning of this moment is, precisely, but I know there is one.

Despite the fact that Doghouse is not a perfect film, the gore gags can be fun, if cheap, at times, and there's enough momentum in the film to carry one through it. It's a marvel that there are still things left to do with the over-saturated zombie sub-genre, but Doghouse makes a stab at doing just that, and using the happenings as a metaphor for the male perspective in a post-feminism society. Whether it completely works or not is up to the individual viewer, but points for trying.

We horror fans are often left with real dross in the zombie department, so seeing a film that allows itself to be ambitious is a nice change of pace. Not the best of type, but a nice enough diversion on a dark night.