Lobo (Caesar the Dog) is half dog and half wolf, and because he is
repeatedly found with dead sheep - which were actually killed by the local
mountainlion - everybody suspects his savage side to shine through, only
Lobo's owner, the trapper Pierre LaPlant (Francis McDonald) believes in
the dog ... until one day he finds Lobo with a dead sheep and thinks he
has caught him red-handed (does the term red-handed actually apply
to a dog ?) - when the mountain lion jumps Pierre and kills him, with Lobo
being unable to save his master. However, he is found over the body, and
soon enough, the Sheriff (Tom London) and a few locals try to hunt him and
his missus down.
But Lobo is not that easy to catch, he knows the woods like the back of
his hand (again, does this apply to a dog ?) and is incredibly resourceful
- at one point he even manages to free his girl from a beartrap.
Eventually, the local sheepherder witnesses the mountainlion killing
one of his sheep, and suddenly he realizes that Lobo was innocent all
along ... but then it might already be too late because Lobo walks into a
trap that leaves him hanging from a tree on a rope, and the sheepherder
walks into a beartrap and is not quite as resourceful as Lobo in freeing
himself, and then the mountainlion attacks.
Somehow though, Lobo can free himself and fight the beast off until
some locals arrive as reinforcement and shoot the mountainlion dead.
And in the end, Lobo becomes the sheepherders new dog.
A rather weird movie, a blend of murder mystery, Western and wildlife
documentary.
Does it work ?
Not really, the elements of the different genres often seem to cancel
each other out, quite a few times, documentary footage seems to bring
everything to a standstill, plus you just can't make an animal film
without making it at least a bit cheesy ...
However, that's not to say Trailing the Killer is necessarily an
all bad movie, it's beautifully filmed, its (animal) action scenes are
competently staged and do have some kind of flair, and the animals are
actually quite convincing at doing what they're doing (the human actors
less so by the way).
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