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Director: Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel Starring: Benoit Poelvoorde, Jacqueline Poelvoorde-Pappaert, Nelly Pappaert, Hector Papaert, Jenny Drye Screenplay: Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel Country: Belgium

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Often misunderstood, Man Bites Dog is not a film about violence, though it is brutal at times. It's a movie about the making of a movie. A documentary crew are following a man named Benoît around. He's a bit of a philosopher, pompous git, racist, hypocrite and would be poet all in one. He also happens to earn his living by bumping people off and stealing their cash. As the film progresses, Benoît takes more and more advantage of the film crew's presence, such as using them as a decoy to lure victims, until he eventually has them not just filming his exploits, but actively involved in them. Their morality and their objectivity quickly falter, and it doesn't help that their subject has become an all important financial backer. The directors of Man Bites Dog maintain that their point with the film was not about violence, and that the film could've been about Benoît being a salesman and had the same message. Naturally, that story might not have made their point as strongly, and what they're saying makes sense, but I don't know that I'd be discussing the movie if Benoît used the crew to sell an extra pair of runners.

As I said, two scenes were cut from the film in the US, and they were two of the most important. I'm going to detail a few specifics in this paragraph now to discuss these scenes and their overall impact on the film. I'm not sure if they're spoilers or not, because if I hadn't known of one's existence, I never would've been on the lookout for a longer cut than the one I saw. In the cut version, the film crew do become involved more and more in the crimes until Benoît is even referring to the unit as a team, but in the uncut version they get up to some nasty business. While at first the crew are doing things like shifting bodies after the killing or searching flats for the now deceased occupant's money, eventually Benoît has them doing the more direct stuff. The first cut bit is in a Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer inspired home invasion scene. A child witnesses Benoît's acts, and runs screaming from the house. Benoît has the crew help chase the child down, and has the director help him kill the child. The most disturbing scene is yet to come, and is the bit cut from Australian prints. The lot of them get drunk on Christmas (yep, just like another Belgian film The Ordeal, Man Bites Dog is a Christmas black comedy, though Man Bites Dog doesn't seem to take place exclusively at Christmas). After being booted from their local, they do a home invasion of another kind, and rape a woman while her partner is held at gunpoint. This is the pivotal moment where all of the crew are equally involved in committing the atrocity, and when the scene ends, the next image is the aftermath of the couple's brutal murders. It is unclear who has done what to the pair, but Benoît has not previously shown a penchant for mutilation, so it seems likely a member of the crew was involved in one of the deaths. This is very interesting, as it is one of the few occurrences where the crew were present and the camera hasn't captured what happened. We've already seen the crew literally kill some competition, so it must've been something very extreme going on to make them quit rolling.

End spoilers.

Even without these moments, the film is powerful, but if you've seen the Australian cut, you HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE. I know sometimes people make a big deal about censored scenes in movies, and when you finally see them, they ain't much, but that is not the case here. Man Bites Dog's cut scenes are vital to the film's message about the media, and are two of the most important showcasings of the line blurring between subject and the creators of the documentary. While Australians are slightly better off than the people who've seen the US unrated cut, the scene missing from domestic prints is a crucial part of the movie.

Man Bites Dog is a savage black comedy, and one of the best you're likely to see. The film draws inspiration from Cannibal Holocaust and Henry, but has left its own mark. The makers of The Blair Witch Project borrow liberally from Man Bites Dog and the entire film was essentially remade locally a few years back as The Magician. When Man Bites Dog is being funny, it is very funny, and Peter Jackson even recycled a running gag for King Kong.

Bizarrely, at the end of the first tape I saw, there was a warning for illiterate adults encouraging them to learn to read. I'm not sure many illiterates would sit all the way through a subtitled movie…