The Wild Dogs attempts to meld two powerful stories but never quite succeeds -- and that's just fine. The film has its clunky moments, but the storytelling never flags.

This third feature from Thom Fitzgerald (Hanging Garden; Beefcake) is a raw and disturbing look at exploitation; Fitzgerald wrote, directed and stars in The Wild Dogs and showed the film last year at the Toronto International film festival.

The Wild Dogs is set in Bucharest, where the stray-dog population threatens to out-number the two-legged creatures. Here is Ceausescu's legacy -- the lame, the halt, the blind and the abandoned. Here are crippled children, roaming gypsies, beggars and street people of all stripe. And dogs. The poverty is breathtaking.

A young Bucharest dogcatcher (Mihai Calota) finds it impossible to do his job. He wanders around the city, incapable of catching and locking up the strays that run everywhere. He and a colleague find themselves hunting stray dogs in the city's ruined opera house. Why, he asks, isn't the formerly beautiful building being fixed up?

"We have CNN now," responds his co-worker.

Into the story comes a Canadian pornographer (Fitzgerald) who is in Bucharest to find younger, less expensive women to photograph. He happens to meet a Canadian diplomat, who proves to be as corrupt as everyone else, as well as that diplomat's wife (Alberta Watson) and daughter (Rachel Blanchard).

The Wild Dogs unfolds to show that East and West are well-matched for brutality and exploitation of the weak.

Our heroic pornographer finds himself compelled to help the crippled and the abandoned he sees within Bucharest. The ambassador's wife also helps people; the most powerful sequence in The Wild Dogs is a bit in which Alberta Watson goes about her day, shopping and dining out, and all the while being followed by a crippled boy to whom she has shown kindness. It is surreal.

Throughout, The Wild Dogs uses scenes of dogs turning on each other to underline comparable human behaviour. The filmmaker might have trusted moviegoers to make those connections on their own. Likewise, the film has a fairly neat and tidy ending that weakens what went before. When you add it all up, The Wild Dogs could have used more Bucharest and less Can-con.

(This film is rated R)

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