Dog Walker (1994 Video) User Reviews

Too good to be a porn

[Max Renn · 10 May 1999]

Well, shooting a porno flick must be an easy task when you have access to some professional performers and a single US$10,000 budget. However, John Leslie (the director) - which is also a talented blues player - managed to create an interesting atmosphere where sex goes along with the story really well. A guy gets in trouble with the Mafia and winds up in the gangsters hands. His life then becomes dream-like as he descends into a sexually twisted world (yeah, there are nasty girls everywhere in his "dungeon"). Unfortunately, this a porn film and has an obligation on showing sex too often. It makes the story seems confuse, not to say a bit pointless sometimes. Anyways, the good aspects of this film reside on this very fact: Leslie (who was a porno star himself from late 70s to mid-eighties) shot an x-rated feature which doesn't suffer from lack of creativity nor technical skills. The last scene of Dog Walker (the one in the dark alley) is probably the coolest and best looking in the porn history. Leslie never did anything better than this, though he kept on producing high-quality erotica in his other works such as The Lecher 2 and Drop Sex.

This guy's so good that one might wonder why he never made it to the mainstream...

A porn masterpiece

[jexline · 10/10 · 19 July 2007]

John Leslie's "Dog Walker", his last after a string of features he made for VCA and his first for his own company, John Leslie Productions at Evil Angel Video, stars Steven St. Croix as Tito, a "man on the edge". After failing to cut a deal with the mob over the dealings of the diamonds he smuggled, he's stopped in a dark alley by a dangerous hit-man (played by Leslie himself), who tells him his life will be turned upside down and he won't even be able to rob a gas station. Up until this point, "Dog Walker" appears to be a straightforward narrative; this is about to change. If I do have issue with "Dog Walker", it is that very little of it makes sense, although that all changes in the end when true motivations are revealed and everything wraps itself up quite neatly. This is a very noirish mood piece, funded by Leslie using his own money, shot on film, and featuring many of the greatest actors of the business, plus the jazzy blues score that became Leslie's trademark. Highly recommended for any fans of the adult film industry, Leslie, or film in general. 10/10

Classic cinema from all-time Adult great John Leslie

[lor_ · 29 August 2016]

IMDb is overdue for a serious review of John Leslie's magnum opus "Dog Walker" so here goes.

This downbeat tale fits well into Leslie's world of mean streets, tough characters and wildly sexual women. Steven St. Croix makes the most of the central role of Tito, a big-time hood introduced presenting the diamonds boodle of his latest crime to unsympathetic middle-management Organization man Jon Dough. Dough tries to stiff him with a "monthly payment plan" more suitable for corporate America than the Underworld, and highly independent St. Croix, balks, tells him where to shove his plan and instantly becomes persona non grata with the mob.

That sounds like the beginning of many a '40s film noir or B-movie gangster saga, but writer-director Leslie (who also has a key small role titled "Fortune Teller" who is really St. Croix's nemesis) turns out to be a philosopher at heart.

SPOILERS BEGIN:

As a devotee of this type of cinema I immediately figured out what Leslie's Grand Scheme for the film (shot on 35mm film stock for a departure in the '90s) was: he presents Tito's story as his Dying Flash. That technique was most vividly used in literature and Robert Enrico's classic film of Ambrose Bierce's short story "Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge". Ken Russell made it his calling card as his favorite story telling device in most of the Composer biographies he filmed in the '60s and '70s. Without spoon-feeding, it translates into a rapid series of images representing one's life passing before one's eyes just before dying.

So we see scenes unfold for Tito that are dreamlike or fantasies, sometimes quite realistic and vivid (as when the XXX content begins) but often repeating motifs and characters in contrasting settings. One such artifice has Leslie via editing moving the action within a scene to an outdoor pampas (replete with Tito in gaucho styled outfit) location that for me created an instant surrealism not often seen in the cinema since the fever dreams of Arrabal and Alexandro Jodorowsky 4 or 5 decades back (and actually inspired by Glauber Rocha's classic Brazilian movies).

But it is the allegorical elements which set "Dog Walker" apart from various other experimental Adult films of its era, the sort of psychedelic and flashy (but usually empty) exercises like "Thundercrack!" or "Cafe Flesh", to name the most famous. Tito keeps seeing an ethereally beautiful woman as an apparition, either as the Dog Walker back-lit in an alley dressed to the nines with her Doberman pooch in tow, or as an elegant horsewoman or even as an ultra-sexy peep show girl masturbating to beat the band behind glass.

This title figure is portrayed by Christina Angel in a performance which overshadows the rest of her career, and reminded me (seeing "Dog Walker" over two decades after its release) of the similarly iconic heroine of the recent hit "Gone Girl". Rosamund Pike in that title role made as big an impression, and is likely (though one would hope not) to be always remembered for it and not what follows. The fact that Pike and Angel have an uncanny resemblance is what prompted my making this odd connection.

Leslie's sex scenes are stylized and potent, the mark of a great director in this field. But of course "Dog Walker" transcends its sex content -that's why it's a true classic the way Gerard Damiano's best ("Devil in Miss Jones", "Story of Joanna" for starters) are. I also enjoy his unsung, more minor features, "The Tease" and "Bad Habits" for example, but give Leslie credit for unbridled creativity and admirable craftsmanship in this, his film for the ages.