Dog Eat Dog : I've rarely seen such a great beginning…

so utterly fall apart. Very disappointing.

Not sure which beginning you're referring to. I'm 10 minutes in and this film is terrible.

I thought the heavily stylized opening scene with Dafoe was daring, powerfully shot, well-written, and bizarrely interesting, but things went rapidly downhill after a while.

Cut to strip club. is always a bad idea.

Your film gods: Lee Van Cleef and Laura Gemser
http://tinyurl.com/pa4ud44

That's not a cliche or anything, is it? Haha. Actually, this thing really fell apart for me once they entered the house with the baby. After that pretty much nothing worked or made sense, imho.

I agree!

Especially the shot of Dafoe taking drugs and looking in the mirror is haunting.

If the whole movie would have been like the beginning, it would have been a blast - and truly disturbing.

There was a nastiness and everything's-possible feel to the direction

How could an excellent writer like Schrader fu*k up like this ?