Backyard Dogs (2001)

Memorable, crazy movie

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I remember seeing this when it came out, back in the days of VHS tapes and video stores. It looked horrible, so of course I felt the need to rent it. I was not disappointed, as it was terrible. Terrible in all the right ways, especially the acting. What do you expect when there's a former Power Ranger in one of the lead roles. It was non-stop laughter all the way through. The "wrestling" was bad, even by backyard wrestling standards, which says a lot. I'd love to know how much they had to pay Hayabusa to be in this piece of crap. When I happened to notice it on Amazon last week for $1.99, I decided to revisit the past on DVD. So happy that I bought it, since it was just as I remembered it. It will make a fine addition to the "so bad it's good" section of my DVD collection.

I picked this movie up for 99 cents and it was a penny short of a dollar I wasted. If you take a look at the name I use here you'll notice I use the name Hayabusa, after Eiji Ezaki who wrestled under the name Hayabusa in Japan. Eiji Ezaki makes an appearance as Hayabus in this movie and I still came came away hating this "film". Think about that for a moment, a wrestler I idolize enough to use his moniker as my own and I still loathe Backyard Dogs. The only good part of this atrocity of a film are the 30 seconds or so which are a promo for the FMW promotion in japan, showing clips of the hardcore style employed in that now-defunct wrestling federation. Shot on video and not film, a soundtrack with the worst metal music of all time. Actors who obviously honed their acting talent in pornography. a complete farce of backyard wrestling and wrestling in general. About halfway through the movie I no longer cared about the main characters who were a tag team that this "documentary" allegedly followed. Do yourself a favor, buy an actual tape of backyard wrestling and skip this piece of trash.

Bob Boris came up with a challenging movie based on Kids going to town to town and wrestling unknown people and the places the ring was. The other challenge was that there were a lot of speaking role of which most of them where actors. SO to do the movie we had to have them join SAG as there are very few people that are Actors that know AA little about wrestling. Another problem we ran into is that the script takes place in a deferent location almost every night. The Director and the co- Producer were at constant odds with each other to make the Director's vision for very little money. From what I was told they shot this movie on various consumer as well as pro-sumer video cameras. This was shot on cameras that were not HD so the initial quality isn't great. This was all done before it was technically possible to have the video look like film. They got a top Lab Engineer at Fotokem Labs in Burbank to oversee the transfer from video to film at the end of the process. Everyone was very happy with the result. I think the film has a very interesting look because of that. When it comes to the acting it wasn't easy as they had people that had not been in a movie before, wrestling pros (including one from Japan that didn't speak English) and Actors who had never wrestled before. The nail talent had to go to school for a week ( all the budget could afford) to train really hard to become the best wrestlers we could afford. I can't tell you what the budget was on this movie but it was well under $XXX,.xxx.00! All the money went into the movie including the cool having on board an Editor who had to help solve many problems that arose making this 1st low budget video2film entertainment. They should have turned this around and made this an MTV TV series. It would be a lot of fun!

I had found out about this movie from a good friend of mine because his uncle (Robert Boris) was the writer and director of this train wreck of a movie. He said it was bad and it even temped me more to go and see it. He was so right.I would not know were to begin to say were this movie gone wrong. Maybe one of the major problems is the fact it was made only to cash in on the big wrestling fad in the late 90's. Lets be honest nobody going to see this movie was exspecting a large charector driven movie. Nevertheless, some how it was way below the horrible expectations I had already had for this movie. Everything was worse than I could have imagined. The acting, the story, and most of all the camera work were some of the worst I've ever seen!At all, coast stay away from this movie unless you want a cheap little laugh at how bad it is. I feel sorry for my friend's relatives who had put money into this movie! If you could call it that!