I’m assuming there are plots to be followed and goals to be worked toward and missions to be completed and crap like that. Point is, out there somewhere at this very minute is a whiny little emo/goth fuck wearing girl jeans that are three sizes two small, pretending with all the power his shriveled little turd of a brain will allow (listening to too much My Chemical Romance has left him with a drastically reduced, IQ, you see – come to think of it listening to ANY My Chemical Romance will drastically reduce your IQ…) that he is in fact a vampire on a mission for his dark mistress who sits in her satin-lined boudoir sipping blood from a cursed chalice while her were-leopard gimp preens in the corner and speaks French to her. And somewhere, Laurell K. Hamilton just had an orgasm.

Now, I’m not slamming geekdom by any means. I’m being stared down by the Tall Man, a Golden Army statuette, a Hellboy Animated action figure, and Dr. Who trading cards autographed by Nick Courtney and John Levene, among other things. It’s just that I don’t go prancing around at my job pretending to be a Doctor Who character, although there are plenty of people I’d like to EXTERMINATE ANNIHILATE DESTROY! But come on, people. It’s hard enough to get laid with a room full of toys, you don’t need to pretend to be a sparkly vam…wait a minute. That shit is huge now. Maybe LARPing DOES get you laid in this mad, mad world.

Anywhat, all this is really just a roundabout way of saying that tonight’s movie’s plot revolves around how much trouble LARPing can get you into. Dante and Ula, a young couple in lurve, are playing a LARP game called “Infiltration”. This means that they have to board a boat filled with illegal immigrants and cross a border unlawfully, and if they get away with it, they win. The downside is, if they lose, they get jailed, beaten, raped, and eaten by a vicious cyborg dog because they don’t have any papers and it’s a really fucking stupid game and our heroes deserve to die for doing something so utterly retarded so there’s really no one in the movie to give a damn about besides the dog.

So Dante winds up on a prison bus with no memory of what happened to Ula. He escapes during some hoo-ha with a scorpion sting, and winds up pursued across the desert by a bounty hunter and a cyborg rottweiler. He manages to kill the hunter, but the relentless hound chases him through several misadventures until he winds up back at the prison he and Ula were originally taken to, where Kufard (Paul Naschy! Kinda lookin’ like an evil Spanish Robert Loggia at this point) reminds him how he nailed Ula in his van before siccing the then-organic dog on her while Dante stood there and cried like a little puss. Dante snapped out of it and beat the dog to death with a pipe. Kufard had it rebuilt as the six million dollar pooch and had it chase him. Kufard dies in a fiery helicopter crash after the dog turns on him and kills him, and Robohound and Dante wind up locked in a death struggle while the fire reduces them to skeletons.

Now, if you don’t think about it too hard, it’s an okay movie. The dog FX are pretty cool, the opening credits animation is fantastic, and there’s some decent gore to keep your interest. However, there are two massive, epic plot holes which, upon consideration, cause the whole thing to deflate and reveal it to be nothing more than the thinnest story the writers could cough up as an excuse to show off a canine Terminator.

Problem 1: The LARPing. Unholy Sweet Satan, the LARPing. I don’t know if you caught what I said about this in the beginning, or if it was just so unbelievably fucking stupid that your brain refused to record the information, much like the memory card on my Wii refuses to record how far I’ve gotten in Godzilla: Unleashed and continuously makes me re-play the damn story mode over and over to unlock monsters I’ve already unlocked about a hundred fuckin’ times. What was I talking about? Right, the LARPing. The only reason any of the shit in this movie happens is because Dante and Ula were playing a game where they had to illegally cross a border on a boat full of refugees…WITH NO FUCKING PAPERS TO GET THEM OUT OF TROUBLE IF THEY GOT CAUGHT! What kind of fucking retarded shit is that? And we’re supposed to feel bad for Ula when the dog rips her heart out, or super-pouty fucking puss Dante who limps and whines his way through the rest of the movie until the dog kills him in the middle of a huge fire? Fuck these people. I’m glad they died. All LARPers should pray for a death as cool as being chewed apart by a cyborg rottweiler. The best most of them can hope for is tripping over their faggy elf shoes and accidentally impaling themselves on their ren-fair reproduction of Narsil. For more on LARPing, see here.

Problem 2: The cyborg rottweiler. The existence of a cyborg rottweiler in itself is an awesome idea, and is presented through mostly practical effects in a pretty damn cool way. However, we are given no explanation as to how it got turned into a robot. Dante killed the original dog after it tore Ula’s still-beating heart from her chest. Kufard then zapped him in the neck with a taser and he woke up on a bus. Unless I know very little about tasers, the thing didn’t put him in a fucking coma, which means he was unconscious and on that bus for no more than a day or two. When they reach their destination, the cyborg dog is already there waiting for him. I doubt there are huge prisoner-moving caravans that trek across all of Europe, so they at most had to drive from one end of Spain to the other. We are given no precedent that this world is futuristic enough (the flick takes place in 2018) to just clap together a cyborg and bring it back to life in a matter of days, and there are no other cyborgs to be seen. So how the hell did Kufard manage to revive his beloved pet as a killer robot in a matter of 48 hours or less?

Brian Yuzna usually manages to turn out some pretty technically well-made flicks, but aside from the second and third Re-Animator flicks, they typically aren’t very good. I get the feeling that even those movies are only as good as they are because of the cast, and not because of Yuzna’s talents. He’s great as Stuart Gordon’s producer, but while he has an eye for making a very polished flick on a very low budget, his directorial talents just don’t match up.

Oh, and if you decide this one’s worth a rental (and it’s an O.K. way to kill an afternoon), remember one thing: Watch for the chicken. Trust me. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.