‘Strays’ or — My Most Unique Movie Going Experience?
Do you like swearing? Do you like dogs? Do you like swearing AND dogs? Then ‘Strays’ (2023) will blow your cinematically maladjusted mind!
‘Strays’ is about an abandoned dog who teams up with some other abandoned dogs to help the abandoned dog return home and bite his owner’s dick off, and that’s pretty much it.
“But Colin!” I hear you gasp, “That doesn’t sound like a particularly compelling plot to hang an entire movie off!” Whoa! Now just wait a second there my overly presumptuous canine kino-kemosabe, as there’s more to this movie than some dogs talking about biting people’s dicks off and constantly saying the words “fuck” and “pussy”. For example, there’s — dogs humping things, dogs pissing on each other, dogs pretending to be prostitutes, dogs saying the word “motherf%cker”, dogs talking about sniffing each others’ anuses (or should that be ‘ani’?) and dogs watching men masturbate. See, there’s WAY more than dick-biting going on here so if you want to embarrass yourself by reducing ‘Strays’ to nothing more than a puerile piece of badly written crap then knock yourself out but don’t drag me into your pathologically close-minded world view, you judgemental prick.
The result is a film that’s unbearably funny. In fact, the humour here is so unbearable I walked out the movie halfway through… something I have never done before with a film in my entire life! I just couldn’t stand it anymore and I knew if I stayed that I’d end up dying of laughter. Well, maybe not from laughter but I knew if I sat there in the cinema any longer there was the increasing risk I’d end up taking my own life before the end credits rolled.
You see, I knew this movie was functioning on a level far beyond my capabilities to fully comprehend and so I discreetly put my jacket on and quietly left the cinema as the audience around me sat there roaring with silence at what they were watching up on screen. I’m humble enough to know when I’m in the presence of something truly ineffable and I soon realised that if I wasn’t laughing at a border collie repeatedly saying the word “twat” after ten minutes then I never would.
Now some so called high and mighty “cineastes” who demand more from their cinema — a well written script, an engaging narrative, proper joke construction, the slightest semblance of actual wit — might dismiss ‘Strays’ as nothing more than puerile, badly written, barrel-scraping, inane, money-grabbing, unfunny shit but these pretentious, ivory tower assholes don’t know what the good old-fashioned, everyday cinema goer wants and what the good old-fashioned, everyday cinema goer wants is to watch a Great Dane eat another dog’s puke and then say the word “fuck”.
Admittedly, walking out of ‘Strays’ means I’ll never know what happens at the end and whether or not any dicks get bitten off but I’m at peace with that because much like the end of the human race, the sudden deaths of the your entire immediate family or having your gonads attacked by wasps there are some things forever best left an alluring and tantalising mystery.
