Average Rating: 3.6/10
Reviews Counted: 53
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 45
Despite a noble effort from Dakota Fanning, Hounddog is overwrought, cliche-ridden and downright exploitative.
Average Rating: 3.5/10
Critic Reviews: 20
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 16
Despite a noble effort from Dakota Fanning, Hounddog is overwrought, cliche-ridden and downright exploitative.
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Average Rating: 3.2/5
User Ratings: 14,876
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A precocious but troubled young girl living in 1950s-era Alabama seeks solace in the music of Elvis Presley in director Deborah Kampmeier's controversial tale of childhood trauma and musical healing. An air of repression lingers over the home of spirited youngster Lewellen (Dakota Fanning), who finds both comfort in the music of pop sensation Presley, as well as a place to store her pain and anger. In time Lewellen begins to find her own voice, a voice that will instill her with the strength to
Sep 19, 2008 Wide
Mar 10, 2009
Empire Film Group
All Critics (55) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (8) | Rotten (47) | DVD (2)
The whole distasteful mess is sunk up to its neck in a brew of Southern Gothic atmosphere and hocus-pocus sentimentality.
Only Fanning's emotional honesty makes Hounddog watchable.
If there's a Southern-gothic cliché (oh, those snakes!) that writer-director Deborah Kampmeier misses, I don't know it.
A slow procession of degradation and suffering, Hounddog is like a tall glass of bitter iced tea.
The latest wallow in regional cliche and stereotype.
The clichés are thick as the kudzu in 1956 Alabama.
An ill-advised variation on Black Snake Moan touting loss of innocence as a source of inspiration.
While the sexualization on screen of a twelve year old actress is dismissed by the filmmaker and some anti-rape organizations because it's intended to focus on a grave crime, one hand washing the other is not the point.
Hounddog boasts a distinctive wood-and-emerald look and several crackerjack performances.
...as discomfiting as you've heard, yet there is one moment near the end that nearly saves it.
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.
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.
It'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.
The only lesson is that if you're a child of the south, you better get yourself adopted by Yankees.
A handsomely produced but unintentionally risible film that mistakes high grotesquerie for high gothic.
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.
Dakota Fanning's luminescent performance grounds this lonely, sordid trip to the rural 1950s South enough to overcome the numerous and cliched stereotypes in this dark tale of a poor country girl innocently obsessed with Elvis.
April 5, 2012Super Reviewer
A young girl grows up in the South with her damaged father, dysfunctional grandmother, and a looming sexuality.I think this film gets a star knocked off as a penalty for its disappointment. I like Dakota Fanning in her dramatic roles more than her saccharine family comedies, and David Morse is always extraordinary.
October 8, 2011
Super Reviewer
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