White Dog and Six Months to Live

Saw White Dog on VHS yesterday and Six Months to Live was apparently stuck on as one of two short bonuses to the bootleg video.

White Dog is an overly dramatic movie never realeased theatrically in this country about an adopted dog in California whose owner discovers it had been trained to be an attack dog. And not just an attack dog, but a dog trained to viciously attack blacks. The film follows the attempt to retrain him - trailer. Glenda was very moved by seeing this movie on TV and tracked down a copy. The movie has played on HBO and probably other cable channels. That movie has it fans who have made more fake trailers. Interesting performances by Burl Ives among others.

Six Months to Live is one of the first short films by Sam Raimi. From Temple of Schlock:

Sam Raimi’s first film was called OUT WEST, a Three Stooges-inspired comic western he shot in 8mm, which was “about 22 seconds long,” he chuckles. As a teen he cranked out around 50 Super 8 movies with friends, all of them comedies, and in college he and his buddies formed a film society in which they charged admission for their films to the college audiences. “With good or bad responses it’s good feedback, especially when they’re paying a buck-fifty. I highly recommend [such a film society] for young filmmakers.” Some of these titles included IT’S MURDER, SIX MONTHS TO LIVE and CLOCKWORK.

Interestingly, Raimi has always been more of a fan of comedy than horror and/or gore. “I was always a fan of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers,” he says. “We wanted to make a first feature in college and realized that, no matter how badly it might’ve turned out in case we failed, the investors could still make some of their money back if we learned how to make a horror movie. So we sat in a drive-in for a summer and studied double feature after double feature of Italian horror pictures, trying to figure out what made them work. And then we tried to make our own.”

Six Months is mainly notable for very poor quality but demonstrates a gift for story-telling. There is a compilation of some of these Raimi short films from fans.

The other bonus short on the DVD was a SNL skit of Jesse Jackson reading "Green Eggs and Ham."