Sunday, 24 May 2015

DogHouse: The Unoriginality of Bird Flu

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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