The Claudio Fragasso Challenge: Monster Dog
Unquestionably the breakout hit of this year's SXSW was the documentary "Best Worst Movie" covering the stars and cult phenomenon that surrounds the movie Troll 2. The documentary is very deserving of the praise, it's surprisingly emotional, you really connect with the characters and it's just better than any movie on the subject of Troll 2 has any right to be.
Oh, and I'm not just saying this because I appear in the film.
One event that I ended up attending during the fest was the SXSW BBQ run, where they took a van full of people out to Lockhart to get the real authentic stuff... After 2-and-a-half months of living in LA, I couldn't wait for it. On the ride over, I shared a van with Troll 2 actor/Best Worst Movie director Michael Paul Stephenson and Cinematical/FearNet writer Scott Weinberg. While many things were discussed, movies at the fest, Twitter, that sort of thing. Eventually the subject of Claudio Fragasso, director of Troll 2 came up. In Best Worst Movie Claduio makes great claims to be a great film director, and that Troll 2 is a great, political film that fans are embracing because it's so good. While it's easy to refute the stuff pertaining to Troll 2, it soon became clear that nobody in the van had ever seen another Claudio Fragasso film.
Thus, the challenge. Scott Weinberg put it up (naming me specifically) and going with the whole, "Wow, that's a terrible idea, it's going to be hilarious when I do it" vibe that inhabits a lot of my life, I soon began crawling the internet to find the rest of Claduio's catalogue.
The Problem
The filmography of Claudio Fragrasso is deceptively long, IMDB lists him as the director of 22 films, but looking further into them, most of them he co-directed with prolific schlock director Bruno Mattei. Mattei is infamous, himself, for just churning out low-budget films in the 70s, mostly dealing in rip-offs and "sequels" to movies that he had nothing to do with, both of which are staples of Italian cinema at the time. Mattei's work mostly covers zombie films, Black Emanuelle films (the unauthorized Emmanuelle films starring Laura Gemser, the beauty who would end up doing costume design for Troll 2), and even ended up doing a rip-off film called Terminator 2 (which, of course, had nothing to do with the series we all know and love).
Mattei would frequently team up with Fragrasso or other filmmakers such as Joe D'amato (who would end up doing a movie called Troll 3), so that he could churn out movies back-to-back just to get more products out into the marketplace. Fragasso is additionally credited on his Mattei team-ups as Assistant Director, making his function on these films much less clear.
Out of the 22 films Fragasso has credit for, he only did 14 on his own. Of those 14, only 2 are readily available in the United States (Monster Dog and Troll 2). I'm working on figuring out which Italian DVDs have English subtitles, but it's very difficult, as even finding the Italian versions is proving to be very difficult, and they're not consistent in their feature listing. Some don't even have official Italian releases, only living on in the grey market DVD-R world.
This is proving more difficult than I had anticipated.
Monster Dog
Monster Dog is the first film both written and directed by Claudio Fragasso (using the pseudonym "Clyde Anderson" for the directing credit)- no co-writer, no co-director, nothing. It's the only film that he would both write and direct on his own, leaving it the only "pure" example of what Fragasso was trying to accomplish in his film career.
While nothing that compares to the cult phenomenon that encircles Troll 2, Monster Dog, surprisingly, has its own cult following - mainly because the lead role is played by none other than Alice Cooper. Cooper, of course, one of the innovators of "shock rock", seems like a fitting person to head up a low-budget Spanish film directed by an Italian. The film features two songs by Cooper that would not be available otherwise until 1999 - these would also be the only times that Cooper's voice is in the film. For whatever reason (either Cooper's refusal, money concerns, or Fragasso's simple not caring) Cooper did not dub his line for the English version of the film.
Here's the song that begins the movie:
Now, let's be fair about this video - immediately following it Cooper's character of Vincent Raven (Not a bad rock name for any aspiring rockers out there) comments on the video, saying that it's awful and the reason for their road trip (hence the long drawn out shots of the van) is to make a new video (which they end up shooting, but to a completely different song). [The Texan Film Nerd in me wants to point out really quick just how wrong it is to have his James Bond iteration using a revolver, thus proving that some stereotypes about Texans are true.]
So how does the movie compare to Troll 2?
It's an utter disappointment.
While Troll 2 is by most every metric a bad movie, it has a certain charm, a certain "what the fuck?" factor to it - scenes that are out of nowhere, a plot that makes little-to-no-sense, irrational actions by characters... it's completely foreign to all of our senses and it leaves us wondering what kind of nutball made it. No, Monster Dog fails in the worst way it could have - it's completely generic and forgettable. Instead of being another piece of bizarre fascination for us, it serves as just another bad horror movie that would find it's home in a stack of VHS movies just like it at a 1995 pre-teen sleepover.
The movie disappoints in such a unique way, I picked up hoping that I'd neither be able to make heads nor tails of it, but instead... it's a straightforward "teens"-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods movie. Yes, it's supposed to be in a small town, but they never leave the house (which is a Nosferatu-esque mansion for reasons that are never addressed in the movie). It has all the tropes you would expect in a nameless movie from the genre: a forewarning from a mysterious stranger, a nightmare sequence, something trying to get inside, somebody hiding their sinister secret... but nothing done in any sort of new or interesting way, even for the time. It is completely indistinguishable from anything else in this genre from this time period.
Monster Dog also disappoints by actually having some funny exchanges - some intentionally funny exchanges - between Cooper and the rest of his crew. Nobody says anything completely outlandish, it all makes relative sense. Sure, some of the stuff doesn't make perfect sense - but in relation to the genre, it falls in line... For instance, when first arriving at the house and searching for the caretaker Raven takes along a fully-loaded shotgun, where other times when it would be more appropriate to be armed, he goes without. It's not quite logical human behavior, but with the standard set so high... it's hardly worth noting.
No, with watching Monster Dog, we have to re-examine our look at Claudio Fragasso. Sure, he's not a great director by any means - the performances are terrible, technically it's not that well made (The dubbing is bad for even an Italian film of the era), but he's not the complete psycho that we were all hoping for. Instead, he's just another guy who put out lame movies.
The Upside
This leaves us in an interesting position - if Claudio Fragasso is not the sheer lunatic that we were hoping for, why is Troll 2 so insane? Fragasso establishes himself as a completely competent writer in this film, making us ask things like "Where did things like the popcorn-laden sex scene come from? How did the whole 'Row-Row-Row Your Boat' being 'that song I like so much' exchange originate?" Looking over this film and its construction makes me wonder if Rossella Drudi, Fragasso's co-writer on Troll 2 and wife, is the real source of the lunacy.
That's not to say that it doesn't explain some aspects of Troll 2, the Monster Dog itself is a poorly made puppet that has basically cannot move besides its mouth and needs to be mostly obstructed. The setup of the two films is essentially the same - a group of people out in the middle-of-nowhere who become attacked by some sort of unnatural beast that inhabits the area. But these similarities aren't enough to connect the two in any real meaningful sort of way. Basically put: If I didn't know that Claudio Fragasso had directed both movies, I would have never made the connection.
Usually when a film leaves us asking questions it's a good thing, it's caused us to examine some part of ourself, to take another look at a value that we hold dear, but no, Monster Dog leaves us asking questions because it has accomplished pretty much nothing.
Oh, and I'm not just saying this because I appear in the film.
One event that I ended up attending during the fest was the SXSW BBQ run, where they took a van full of people out to Lockhart to get the real authentic stuff... After 2-and-a-half months of living in LA, I couldn't wait for it. On the ride over, I shared a van with Troll 2 actor/Best Worst Movie director Michael Paul Stephenson and Cinematical/FearNet writer Scott Weinberg. While many things were discussed, movies at the fest, Twitter, that sort of thing. Eventually the subject of Claudio Fragasso, director of Troll 2 came up. In Best Worst Movie Claduio makes great claims to be a great film director, and that Troll 2 is a great, political film that fans are embracing because it's so good. While it's easy to refute the stuff pertaining to Troll 2, it soon became clear that nobody in the van had ever seen another Claudio Fragasso film.
Thus, the challenge. Scott Weinberg put it up (naming me specifically) and going with the whole, "Wow, that's a terrible idea, it's going to be hilarious when I do it" vibe that inhabits a lot of my life, I soon began crawling the internet to find the rest of Claduio's catalogue.
The Problem
The filmography of Claudio Fragrasso is deceptively long, IMDB lists him as the director of 22 films, but looking further into them, most of them he co-directed with prolific schlock director Bruno Mattei. Mattei is infamous, himself, for just churning out low-budget films in the 70s, mostly dealing in rip-offs and "sequels" to movies that he had nothing to do with, both of which are staples of Italian cinema at the time. Mattei's work mostly covers zombie films, Black Emanuelle films (the unauthorized Emmanuelle films starring Laura Gemser, the beauty who would end up doing costume design for Troll 2), and even ended up doing a rip-off film called Terminator 2 (which, of course, had nothing to do with the series we all know and love).
Mattei would frequently team up with Fragrasso or other filmmakers such as Joe D'amato (who would end up doing a movie called Troll 3), so that he could churn out movies back-to-back just to get more products out into the marketplace. Fragasso is additionally credited on his Mattei team-ups as Assistant Director, making his function on these films much less clear.
Out of the 22 films Fragasso has credit for, he only did 14 on his own. Of those 14, only 2 are readily available in the United States (Monster Dog and Troll 2). I'm working on figuring out which Italian DVDs have English subtitles, but it's very difficult, as even finding the Italian versions is proving to be very difficult, and they're not consistent in their feature listing. Some don't even have official Italian releases, only living on in the grey market DVD-R world.
This is proving more difficult than I had anticipated.
Monster Dog
Monster Dog is the first film both written and directed by Claudio Fragasso (using the pseudonym "Clyde Anderson" for the directing credit)- no co-writer, no co-director, nothing. It's the only film that he would both write and direct on his own, leaving it the only "pure" example of what Fragasso was trying to accomplish in his film career.
While nothing that compares to the cult phenomenon that encircles Troll 2, Monster Dog, surprisingly, has its own cult following - mainly because the lead role is played by none other than Alice Cooper. Cooper, of course, one of the innovators of "shock rock", seems like a fitting person to head up a low-budget Spanish film directed by an Italian. The film features two songs by Cooper that would not be available otherwise until 1999 - these would also be the only times that Cooper's voice is in the film. For whatever reason (either Cooper's refusal, money concerns, or Fragasso's simple not caring) Cooper did not dub his line for the English version of the film.
Here's the song that begins the movie:
Now, let's be fair about this video - immediately following it Cooper's character of Vincent Raven (Not a bad rock name for any aspiring rockers out there) comments on the video, saying that it's awful and the reason for their road trip (hence the long drawn out shots of the van) is to make a new video (which they end up shooting, but to a completely different song). [The Texan Film Nerd in me wants to point out really quick just how wrong it is to have his James Bond iteration using a revolver, thus proving that some stereotypes about Texans are true.]
So how does the movie compare to Troll 2?
It's an utter disappointment.
While Troll 2 is by most every metric a bad movie, it has a certain charm, a certain "what the fuck?" factor to it - scenes that are out of nowhere, a plot that makes little-to-no-sense, irrational actions by characters... it's completely foreign to all of our senses and it leaves us wondering what kind of nutball made it. No, Monster Dog fails in the worst way it could have - it's completely generic and forgettable. Instead of being another piece of bizarre fascination for us, it serves as just another bad horror movie that would find it's home in a stack of VHS movies just like it at a 1995 pre-teen sleepover.
The movie disappoints in such a unique way, I picked up hoping that I'd neither be able to make heads nor tails of it, but instead... it's a straightforward "teens"-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods movie. Yes, it's supposed to be in a small town, but they never leave the house (which is a Nosferatu-esque mansion for reasons that are never addressed in the movie). It has all the tropes you would expect in a nameless movie from the genre: a forewarning from a mysterious stranger, a nightmare sequence, something trying to get inside, somebody hiding their sinister secret... but nothing done in any sort of new or interesting way, even for the time. It is completely indistinguishable from anything else in this genre from this time period.
Monster Dog also disappoints by actually having some funny exchanges - some intentionally funny exchanges - between Cooper and the rest of his crew. Nobody says anything completely outlandish, it all makes relative sense. Sure, some of the stuff doesn't make perfect sense - but in relation to the genre, it falls in line... For instance, when first arriving at the house and searching for the caretaker Raven takes along a fully-loaded shotgun, where other times when it would be more appropriate to be armed, he goes without. It's not quite logical human behavior, but with the standard set so high... it's hardly worth noting.
No, with watching Monster Dog, we have to re-examine our look at Claudio Fragasso. Sure, he's not a great director by any means - the performances are terrible, technically it's not that well made (The dubbing is bad for even an Italian film of the era), but he's not the complete psycho that we were all hoping for. Instead, he's just another guy who put out lame movies.
The Upside
This leaves us in an interesting position - if Claudio Fragasso is not the sheer lunatic that we were hoping for, why is Troll 2 so insane? Fragasso establishes himself as a completely competent writer in this film, making us ask things like "Where did things like the popcorn-laden sex scene come from? How did the whole 'Row-Row-Row Your Boat' being 'that song I like so much' exchange originate?" Looking over this film and its construction makes me wonder if Rossella Drudi, Fragasso's co-writer on Troll 2 and wife, is the real source of the lunacy.
That's not to say that it doesn't explain some aspects of Troll 2, the Monster Dog itself is a poorly made puppet that has basically cannot move besides its mouth and needs to be mostly obstructed. The setup of the two films is essentially the same - a group of people out in the middle-of-nowhere who become attacked by some sort of unnatural beast that inhabits the area. But these similarities aren't enough to connect the two in any real meaningful sort of way. Basically put: If I didn't know that Claudio Fragasso had directed both movies, I would have never made the connection.
Usually when a film leaves us asking questions it's a good thing, it's caused us to examine some part of ourself, to take another look at a value that we hold dear, but no, Monster Dog leaves us asking questions because it has accomplished pretty much nothing.