Baxter (1989)

Price: $1.50
Length: 82 minutes
Director: Jerome Boivin
Starring: A Bull Terrier and a bunch of French people

I guess there are some people in this world who don't find Ingmar Bergman movies fucking hilarious. I don't know what to tell these people because for my money, Wild Strawberries is a much funnier movie than some Billy Wilder bullshit like Some Like It Hot or whatever else was passing for funny in late 1950s America. Something about the fulfillment of absurd Foreign Film Cliches in Bergman's work just makes much guffaw every time. Blame the deluge of Seventh Seal parodies (Animaniacs, Conan O'Brien, Bogus Journey, etc.) I was privy to long before I gathered my nuts and started shuffling through the foreign section at the local blockbuster. By the time I finally saw the Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, I was so used to laughing at their black and white iconography and existential brooding that even Bergman's formidable filmmaking chops were not enough to muffle my laughs. Also, I was 12.

Now a lot of people really love SLIT, many even claim it as the best comedy ever made, which is fine because no one knows why people find the things funny that they do, it's just instinct, cause and effect type shit. Either way, alls I'm getting at is that pretty much every review I can find of this BAXTER movie online (no michael showalters allowed here fyi) yacks on and on about how disturbing and dark this movie is, which is I suppose one way of looking at it.

For those of you who don't know, here's a quick ploticular miles runs the voodoo down: Baxter is an adorable bull terrier dog, total Spuds McKenzie doppelganger effect, who can think, has killed people in the past, will kill people again, and who develops obsessive psycho possessive crushes on human women. All of this might be disturbing if this movie were made in any other country on earth apart from France and if the movie were not in black and white, which tips its manifest artiness out of the blue and into the black. So yeah, we get an evil adorable dog with an interior monologue voiced by a middle aged French guy killing people in black and white. It's the perfect storm of hilarity!

And boy, does this movie deliver. Maybe the funniest movie I've seen this calendar year. The dog he has a french accent! HAHAHAHAHAHA! You owe it to yourself to see it. It's great. It's on DVD now, too, so feel free to add it to your Netflix Q, and don't be put off by Lionsgate's SAW-esque DVD packaging. It's all they know how to do, so don't blame them, blame society. In addition to reminding me of the absurd hilarity of black and white Ingmar Bergman (whose color films I actually find quite devastating, especially the one with Elliott Gould), this movie reminded me somewhat of a film I hate MAN BITES DOG. However, whereas that film was loathsome overrated belabored crap that took itself way to seriously like a trustafarian undergrad prating on and on about how society is fucked up and shit, maaaaaaaaan, our culture of violence is a manifestation of bourgeois angst in a tortilla wrapped inside a donut placed in a field of loofah sponges. FUCKing hell, that movie is bad. No wonder the dude('s) who made it offed himself. I would to if that was all anyone knew me for. Granted nobody knows me for anything at this point, but that's the way I like it. Except INEED$, do you know who is hiring?

PS. SEE BAXTER the one with the dog on it ITS HILARIOUS!!!!!