Who hates grandmothers, would eat babies before licking troubled teenagers? He is man’s best friend of course: Baxterthe thinking dog.
Some thirty-three years after its release, Baxter remains a film resolutely apart. With a handful of defenders responding to him with finger and eye, his nose wet as soon as the 1989 film arises at the bend of an improbable conversation, he remains a little-watched feature film, which it would be wrong to abandon on the highway rest area of oblivion. It is that, despite being a digest of intelligence, the fruit of the early career of two artists in the making, it is also a small digest of terror, and a rather visionary description of a certain peripheral France.
The beautiful beast!
FIT THE BEAST
Ken Greenhall is not a famous author in France, and his novel hell hound, immersed in the first person in the thoughts of a psychotic bull terrier, is not (re)known there for the remarkable compendium of chills that he is. Moreover, if the American novelist had it published in 1977 and the following year in the Gallimard Black Series, under the title Killers like no otherit was not really until 1989 that the text found a wider audience.
Thanks to its upcoming adaptation, the publisher will attach to it what will become the poster – chilling – of the film, from which it recovers the title. And the two creators who aspire to bring this story to the screen will have a lot of work to do. First of all, they will have to rework the tone of the film, so that it can stick to filming in France.
Grandma doesn’t know how to make good coffee
Who says France, also says rewriting of the characters, of which the cultural substrate is very important within their characterization, which must be successful so that the different situations and atrocities that the screenplay depicts are credible, human, or quite simply close enough to the spectator for him to react to them, identify with them or rejects. It also remains to modify in subtlety the raw material of the text.
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