Ôgon no inu

Most Americans will likely get here because of the rise in popularity of the fantastic soundtrack for this movie done by Yuji Ohno (of Lupin the 3rd fame), so I thought I would try to find and watch this movie to see if the fantastic soundtrack accompanied a fantastic movie. Boy was I wrong!

The cover of The Golden Dog implies a monster movie about a dog, but what I got was a wholly hard to follow violent affair involving Japanese cops and criminals. The movie starts off with a man who comes into possession of a dog after his friend dies in a hunting accident. But, what follows next is a a plot filled with random nonsequitors of crime, and interwoven subplots of various characters with flashbacks. Watch as you are whisked away to various random scenes of a woman being coerced into sex at knifepoint, then to the dog fighting a seal on the beach, gunfire shootouts between a detective investigating previous murders, all while the dog carries microfilm in his collar throughout Japan. A wholly unintelligible movie, and whoever said this was as good is Kurosawa must be joking. Don't waste your time with The Golden Dog, because this one is as good as solid gold doggy doo-doo!

Excellent, impossible to forget. In addition to a well-built script full of twists and turns, the film features an excellent, perfectly characterized cast, good cinematography and a soundtrack with perfect jazz funk fusion rhythms. The mix of political intrigue with the attached police investigations combined with the daring adventures of an exceptional and never domine dog, as the nature of the species wants, is very interesting and original. Japanese cinema manages numerous times to give the viewer fantastic moments, I personally loved Antarctica (1983) and then Woman in the dunes (1964), Kuroneko (1968), Onibaba (1964), Kwaidan (1964). Cure (1997) The Twilight Samurai (2002), Little Forest: (2014) (2015), One Cut of the Dead (2017) and many others such as the classics of Kurosawa, Kitano, Mike, Ozu, precisely Kobayashi, animation Myazaki and numerous manga, including the samurai sagas of Ogami and Zatoichi. This film, as far as I'm concerned, is therefore one of the best ever seen in the filmography so far seen of the Japanese country, which is why I attributed a full 10/10 to it.