A film mosaic about suburban Vienna, Austria. Though the various characters are diverse and seem to be relatively normal people (on the outside at least), all of them clearly have their own struggles. The only one who straight away comes off as... off, is the girl who hitches rides with anyone she can and then bothers and insults them until they see themselves forced to kick her out of their cars. Most stories overlap just a little at one point or another, but for the greater part they live separate lives. All of this is intertwined with the heatwave that's taking place, wherein people lie motionless and practically naked outside their houses in their neatly divided suburban area.The characters are portrayed without mercy: old, obese, simple, helpless, angry, sad - whatever they are, they are. Seidl portrays them in such a sober way, one would at times think it must be a documentary, including some of the actors looking into the camera. Even though the introductions of the characters are too long to my taste (as are some of the scenes where finally some of the plots finally begin to unfold), the fly on the wall-feel of it keeps it rather fascinating throughout.8 out of 10.

This movie sucks ass. Something about a heatwave in some European country, complete trash. There's nothing going for this movie whatsoever. maybe 30 seconds of sex but that's it. There is a very annoying chick who hitches rides with people and really pisses me off. This movie is complete rash and you shouldn't subject yourself to watching it. I regret it it's very boring. I would rate it zero but i can't. No body in their right mind should see this. i'm sure you'll regret it completely i did. How could they think up something this bad. Even Mystery men was better. MYSTERY MEN. That sucks. That movie wasn't worth being made. complete waste of time. The characters in this are very hard to understand and i good very very very bored.

This film is great. As often heard, it is indeed very realistic and sometimes brutal, but unlike some other people I am clearly not of the opinion that it is depressing, negativistic or dismantling Austria as a proto-fascist society. Quite the contrary: While there are indeed some very heavy scenes in HUNDSTAGE and some characters are to be called very bad persons, at the same time you watch love, beauty and humor in Ulrich Seidls film. And that's exactly what distinguishes HUNDSTAGE for me from other films that try to show the lives of the 'ordinary people' in an intense, realistic way; their hustle, their wishes, their dark sides: Seidl clearly never tries to prove, that the lives of the working-class people are trash! In my opinion, viewers who come to this conclusion seem to be very afraid of admitting, that nearly nobody's live is as 'clean' and 'normal' as we would like other people to believe. And that every live has its dark and often depressing sides. The most beautiful scene: The old Viennese man, watching his old girl dancing 'the oriental way', as he is calling it. I think everybody who finds this scene ugly lacks a sense of beauty and should ask themselves what it is, that's proto-fascist: The characters in HUNDSTAGE or viewers, who are turned off by the body of a 70+ year old woman, dancing with all her charms for her lover.

Well, here we are again, sports fans, Amateur Nite In Salzburg. Somewhere out there there are people with money to burn, usually guardians of 'lottery' money, and if YOU come up with an idea that is mindless, crass, outrageous, vulgar preferably all at once then you too can become a film director. In this case some case of arrested development has hit upon the original idea of filming six stories that seek to outdo each other in banality and calling it a screenplay. You want a psychopath beating up his girlfriend and/or any man who dares to look at her -quite a trick NOT to when she works in a strip joint - we got it, you want a retard whose life is devoted to hitching rides and then boring the drivers to death with incessant banal chatter, we got that, too. Ya wanna see the retard get raped, boy, did YOU get a RIGHT number. You want me to go on? If yes just how sick are you. What a load of drek. -10.