Dog Pound (2010) (Blu-ray)

Not a film for everyone. No plot to speak of. Little character development. I would say instead "character EXPOSITION." Disappointingly weak on special features. A directors commentary would have been very welcome.

Yet there are some terrific things about it. If there is a theme it is the challenge of anger management in men, especially young men.

Three teen age boys are incarcerated in a reformatory. They are not good kids or terrible kids. They face the usual prison/reformatory issues of peck order and male jostling. But in this film it is refreshingly not an overdone cliche. In fact the film gets across an atmosphere of boredom and routine without being boring and routine. Congratulations. It is almost poetic in the sense that you have to read into the characters and the atmosphere even though the film has the feeling of being "rambling" and sometimes "slow" as poems often are. If you are open to doing this then there is certainly an underlying very disturbing tension. Our three stray dogs face disgusting bullies that are psychological sadists and also capable of violent intimidation. How does one deal with one's anger in this atmosphere? This is a special challenge for teen age boys of course. You see this in their faces and actions and not in the dialogue.

This was most of the film for me -watching emotions build up and finding release in various ways, and reaching breaking points. They did a great job if you like films that "tell truth" about humans in this style. The film focuses on the anger of the Butch character and actually his motives are not bad. He mostly gets angry at injustices. With a different life trajectory he could end up a socially constructive hero in my opinion. But the film does not glamorize him or make him do heroic things and you would have to form this opinion on your own.

There is sort of a plot. Pretty generic and thus not much of one. If Butch can keep his cool he can get out soon. Can he keep his cool in the face of sadistic kids? That does add a little structure and suspense.Hardly the most distinctive thing about the film, or reason to praise it.

The guards are not as one might expect from the genre sadistic bullies. They are just guys doing their jobs. But they also have their breaking points and this really helps weave together the theme of anger management especially in men.

The tension is broken at times by some very nice scenes where the boys take time off so to speak from the serious psychological battle and slip into boys just horsing around with good natured bravado and jabs. If you think about it, this is pretty common for boys and the nasty stuff in the reformatory is sort of an amplification of this play hostility.

The film offers no solutions so far as reformatories and anger, and some will rank it down for that. In this sense it is like the Oz TV series, which also offers no solutions to our prison problems. But I would say that this film is not really about our correctional systems. It is more a fine portrait about the anger that can so easily be stirred up within us.

This is a great movie, tense, well acted, well filmed...but so was the original that gets no credit here at all even though it is stolen from scene by scene. The filmaker has re-produced/remade SCUM scene by scene character by character from start t ofinsih...even the rape scene is exactly duplicated down to the victim's name (Davis), instead of a garden shed it happens in a laundry room but is exactly copied down to the victims reaction and the bell ringing in the middle of the night and the suicide...and as I said even the name is unchanged. the gym fight scene and cafeteria fight scene again completely duplicated. Even the way the lead character goes after the "daddy" all the same.

that said...I still liked it.

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I bought this movie after seeing Scum this came up on the recommend perches so I bought it. I can see the similarities in the two, Dog Pound is a more up to date and not too bad I recommend this to buy...

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I purchased a copy of this DVD because I am a fan of Adam Butcher who played in a minor Canadian film entitled: "Saint Ralph." He has grown up into a young man by the time he made "Dog Pound." It is another Canadian film although it depicts life inside a juvenile detention centre somewhere in Montana USA. Aside from Adam Butcher, I did not know any of the other actors, but they all played their parts convincingly. The plot is very good as four juvenile offers are processed and then introduced into the prison population. There are bullies, there is drug smuggling, and a realistic sense that the prison system is in complete control from the time they enter it and during their stay there. The only problem with this film that I could see was that its ending is anticlimactic. It is unpredictable as it should be, but somehow the viewer expects more to follow. I would recommend this film to anyone into prison films and couple it with the film "On The Inside." "Dog Pound" is a good film for a rainy afternoon, but not something that I would pull out the popcorn and beer to watch at night.

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This movie to me was on the same page as a requiem for a dream and felon when it came to just the raw factor being brutally honnest on the juveniles jailing system. Great acting by butch the main charActer