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04/23/09
Hounddog (2008)
16 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 49
Fresh: 8
Rotten:41
Average Rating: 3.7/10
Consensus: Despite a noble effort from Dakota Fanning, Hounddog is overwrought, cliche-ridden and downright exploitative.
Theatrical Release:Sep 19, 2008 Limited
Synopsis: HOUNDDOG is writer-director Deborah Kampmeier's controversial story of lost innocence set in rural Alabama in the 1950s. Heavy with the dank, rustic hues of the South, the film is a powerfully... [More]
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Robin Wright Penn, David Morse, Piper Laurie
Director: Deborah Kampmeier
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Reviews for Hounddog
The whole distasteful mess is sunk up to its neck in a brew of Southern Gothic atmosphere and hocus-pocus sentimentality.
10/31/08
Top CriticHounddog boasts a distinctive wood-and-emerald look and several crackerjack performances.
10/31/08
Only Fanning’s emotional honesty makes Hounddog watchable.
10/18/08
Top Critic...as discomfiting as you've heard, yet there is one moment near the end that nearly saves it.
10/08/08
Fanning resembles an acting robot: stick a quarter in her head and she'll dial up any reaction in the book, absent the needed gravitas.
10/02/08
We're seeing Fanning in soaking wet white underwear playing in the river, gyrating like Elvis. That's worse that an exploitative rape scene. This is just the filmmakers deciding to depict salacious behavior.
09/26/08
If there's a Southern-gothic cliché (oh, those snakes!) that writer-director Deborah Kampmeier misses, I don't know it.
09/26/08
Top CriticA slow procession of degradation and suffering, Hounddog is like a tall glass of bitter iced tea.
09/25/08
Top CriticIt's hard to take this wild mixture of sledgehammer symbolism, period Southern Gothic, race-conscious uplift and cautionary coming-of-age parable seriously, despite Fanning's remarkable poise.
09/24/08
The only lesson is that if you're a child of the south, you better get yourself adopted by Yankees.
09/19/08
A handsomely produced but unintentionally risible film that mistakes high grotesquerie for high gothic.
09/19/08
Kampmeier takes everything from the Flannery O'Connor school of Southern Gothic, tosses in cringe-worthy dialogue, and throws in not one but two horrible archetypes for good measure.
09/19/08
The latest wallow in regional cliche and stereotype.
09/19/08
Top CriticThe clichés are thick as the kudzu in 1956 Alabama.
09/19/08
Top CriticRarely has there been a movie as misguided as Hounddog, which self-righteously indulges in exploitation while loudly decrying it.
09/19/08
Top CriticThe problems that plague the movie land squarely with the writer, director and producer, Deborah Kampmeier, who has crafted a howler of a bad script, shows little affinity for working with actors and displays no visual sense behind the camera.
09/19/08
Top CriticA bewildering slice of southern gothic hokum, it suffers from a weak script, proving that old saw about actors being only as good as the lines they're given.
09/19/08
Top CriticInstead of embracing its pulpy nature, it aims for seriousness, then gives us cornpone performances, a lightning bolt that triggers a tractor's ejector seat, and a simple-minded view of saintly black folk who possess a dangerous blues.
09/19/08
The rape scene is disturbing, but it's not as surprising as the movie's unreconstructed racial attitudes or its deadpan cartoon portrayal of the lightning-struck, rattlesnake-bit, tick-infested white-trash denizens of the humid 1950s Deep South.
09/19/08
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