MOVIE REVIEW : 3-D Can’t Save Flat, Long-on-the-Shelf ‘Rottweiler’

It’s a good thing that the 1981 3-D “Rottweiler” (at the Vagabond) is as bad as it is. If you couldn’t laugh at it, it would really be a tedious business.

It is, of course, about Rottweilers, a dozen of them--bred and trained to be killer dogs--that go AWOL from the Army en route to Ft. Bragg and terrorize a mountain resort. That “Rottweiler” plays like an amateur parody of TV’s “Twin Peaks” helps you get through it, but this long-on-the-shelf item--being shown in a scratchy print--lacks the necessary energy to make it even as a so-bad-it’s-good midnight movie.

“Rottweiler” producer Earl Owensby stars as the sheriff at Lake Lure, where the main attraction is female mud wrestling and where most of the Rottweilers’ victims are scantily clad women. Performances, direction (by Worth Keeter) and script (by Thom McIntyre) are uniformly lousy. The film is just as flat as if it hadn’t been shot in 3-D, of which little use has been made.

Reportedly, “Rottweiler” had a brief run in Chicago and in some small towns, and it did cause a bit of a stir in late 1981 when the American Rottweiler Club complained that the film gave the big, powerful German working dogs a bad image. Since then, the breed has had an increasingly negative press for which this forgettable movie, also known as “Dogs From Hell,” cannot be blamed.