Movie-Specific : Mad Dog Time aka Trigger Happy

[djross]

This is the first time I have opened a thread with the purpose of recommending a movie. I was not prompted to do so because I watched this film recently (it has been some years), but because of a combination of two reasons: (1) I have just purchased a copy of an Asian release version of the DVD of this movie on ebay (another first for me), at very low cost from a South Korean distributor; (2) my feeling that this film's extremely poor reputation ought to be countered. Glancing at the Wikipedia entry for the film, for example, I learn that Siskel and Ebert considered it to be the worst movie of 1996. With that in mind, it is obviously not possible to recommend this film without also making clear that there are many people who consider it to be awful. It is thus perhaps the case that there will be very few who enjoy this movie the way I do. The hope in posting this thread, of course, is that very few is a number greater than one.

Mad Dog Time (which I saw at the cinema - one of the few to do so, it seems - but under the title Trigger Happy) is the directorial debut for Larry Bishop, son of Joey Bishop. It is a very unusual kind of a comedy, set in a very unusual kind of a world (no doubt it was this combination of unusualnesses that so many found so off-putting), and it is a kind of comedy that is at times rather dark (reminding me in this, but only in this, of two other great and rather overlooked comedies, Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid starring Charles Grodin, and Robert Bierman's Vampire's Kiss starring Nicolas Cage).

My score for this movie was 85, placing it in my top 10% of ranked films. As I prefer not to give too much away, I will merely reproduce my mini-review (the only one among the twenty rankings at Criticker):

A genuinely philosophical comedy and a truly Machiavellian film (in a good way). No doubt there are many people who will not relate at all to this film, but I thought it was a great movie. Numerous excellent performances, especially from Richard Dreyfuss. In my view this is surely one of the most under-appreciated and unduly neglected movies of all time.

[OMGFridge]

Similar to Vampire' Kiss? I am a huge fan of that so will check this out and report back with my thoughts.

[djross]

I wasn't exactly meaning to say that Mad Dog Time is "similar to Vampire's Kiss": the latter has a more hilarious style of comedy, whereas the former engages in a lot more word-play and inhabits a very artificial universe (as the first shot makes clear).

[astrakhan]

In order for me to pursue your recommendation you need to provide more detail about the film. Currently the only thing you told us is that it's a dark comedy set in an unusual world.

[djross]

Then don't pursue it.

[djross]

Having finally gotten around to viewing my Korean DVD, I can confirm that my high opinion of this movie remains unchanged (although I have rewritten my mini-review).