Warning:
Spoilers.
Doghouse
was a flop at the box office, making only £56K and it shows that if you want to
make an openly sexist film that even misogynists have standards. As zombie
films go it can be a difficult genre to crack – whilst the zombies in this film
are certainly unique and vicious the humans have to be ones you want to see
saved. Having a cast of laddish blokes who are openly sexist and two
dimensional makes this film one where you’re kind of rooting for the zombie women
to win, and not just because I’m a ‘man hating feminist’ too.
The film
opens showing each male character getting away from their nagging other halves;
they are going away to help a friend recover from a divorce and obviously us
women never want our boyfriends to spend time with their friends. Dyer’s
character alone leaves a one night stand, not remembering the woman’s name, and
saying she’d make a good prostitute and leaving on a ‘that’s a compliment!’
note, and that is about as original as his dialogue gets. The friends meet up,
disrespect a few women on the way – renaming their female driver Candy – and head
to the quiet town of Moodley.
Once there
the film uses the usual zombie film cliché of the main characters not noticing
that something is very off. However this lack of awareness, we find out, is due
to each main male character being an absolute idiot. They often make very
obvious mistakes, cause most of their own problems, and generally are stupid
throughout. Whether this is to justify their view on women or not it just makes
for characters that you are more than happy to see leave us. This then
encompasses the entire film because the reasoning behind the zombie women is
one that doesn’t really make sense.
The origin
of the zombification is that it was a failed experiment by the government to
infect women through washing up powder – yes, really – and turn them into
mindless beasts to use as an army. The army man who explains the virus to them
on the one hand explains that it was luck that the virus only affected women
but also that it was a genius plan to use half the population to kill the other
half, only they forgot that that also included the men who created them. It is
a plan that forgets that turning women into violent creatures designed to kill
men would be a bad idea in a patriarchal world; this is because as we find out
they do not discriminate between the army men who were guarding them, a local
politician, or your local shop owners – basically meaning that the world would
very soon stop being a patriarchy and one run by manic zombie women.
It could be
argued that actually they do have a way of controlling these wild beasts as
later we see them using a device to emit a high frequency sound that only women
can hear – ignoring the fact that age is a big factor in hearing high frequency
sounds and that deaf people exist this is a really poor plan. If it was their
only way of controlling them then it can fail, as it does in the film, or it
could be used by the enemies they face to easily subdue them. It wouldn’t be
too hard to recreate the noise needed to stop them. It also ignores the fact
that in the film it is shown that the noise only works when they evolve into
phase two – meaning phase one zombies are uncontrollable but also not as
efficient at killing. Whilst I’m all for giving zombie movies a bit of leeway
when it comes to their virus origins – it is fiction after all – if you’re
going to attempt to explain it you better do it right, especially if you want
to justify your misogyny.
Whilst the
film breaks some gender stereotypes, such as having a female politician who
survives, a female butcher, and a female dentist, it happily reinforces others.
There is a zombie who twirls her hair, a zombie hairdresser, and even an obsessive
overweight zombie who crushes one of the main characters. Schaffer, who wrote
the film, attempted to create self-aware characters by having some mention
respecting women, using their actual names, and not objectifying them – though that
was mostly left down to the gay character to be their moral compass; though
even he failed in a comic moment by pointing out that calling their driver by her
actual name after she’d turned was not the ‘right time to stop objectifying
women’.
The film
also made sure to have another staple of laddish culture, it was only missing
racism from what I could tell, which was homophobia. During the character
introductions we see the character Graham is gay; his boyfriend is protesting
to him going out on a lad’s weekend and his objections are met with the line ‘sorry,
no girlfriends allowed’. This camp stereotype character helped the film pretend
it was ‘PC’, as Dyer’s character mentioned, whilst giving them an outlet for
their homophobic comments. However homophobia to a bloke is entwined with a
fear of being more feminine than masculine and this again is shown later in the
film. To get past the zombies a few male characters dress up as women and again
there are many joking comments about their sexuality, about their identity as
men, and the usual panic if any man is seen to be anything less than Manly™.
The zombies
in this film are vicious, they evolve claws and they wield weapons and yet in
true illogical sexist style they are played down at every turn. In a way reminiscent
of Shaun of the Dead – “They’re not all there” – the film treats them like
walking brainless idiots; whilst this is usually what zombies are in films it
is a line that they shouldn’t have crossed when making all of their zombies
female. The women regularly, and easily, get distracted and more than that they
often turn on each other; it happens many times but most significantly it is
used to save Dyer’s character when he falls into a bedroom filled with three
female zombies. As Dyer’s character often repeats “women love me” and whilst
that probably isn’t true it is for the female zombies who would rather fight
each other for his body than simply go for the prize.
In the town
of Moodley, next to a toy shop, is The Burning Witch – a place to buy Occult
merchandise from a large breasted women in a black dress who wields an eye
patch. This particular zombie, in a move of staggering unoriginality, gets set
on fire; though she later returns to kill a main character with her sword
before being killed herself. This constant image of a witch and the fact that
the zombies have largely communed in the woods lends to the film the idea that
women are, and have always been, evil witches.
Whilst ‘witch’
mostly gets used nowadays as a veiled way to call someone a bitch or to refer
to a woman who does something someone doesn’t like it has a disgustingly misogynistic
history. Nine million women were routinely and legally murdered for being ‘witches’.
A witch was anyone who was deemed to fit some arbitrary idea and list of
features that people had come up with. It was a pointless and sexist genocide
that is now reduced to a cute Halloween costume for children; with very little
teaching of what happened in schools, little mention of the true scale and
horror in popular culture, and now it’s being used to get a cheap gag in a
boring, unfunny film with a dull cast and sexist jokes. It’s more insulting
than it is humorous.
I went into
Doghouse knowing I would be met with a misogynistic premise and sexist jokes
and I wasn’t disappointed. Its shred of self-awareness felt a little too late
next to its insistence that people wanted to see ‘proper blokes’ and found lad
humour funny. As a lover of zombie films it couldn’t even hold up there as it
repeatedly underutilised them for cheap gags. The ending is one which clearly
implies a bad fate for their protagonists is one I never cared about due to the
fact that their insistence on aggressively driving through a Gillette billboard
cost them their only means of escape. Whilst I clearly wasn’t the intended viewer
it seemed it didn’t even care much for any audience.
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