I’ve made many films over the years and inevitably the ones I put the most effort into are the ones that are shunned, spat upon, or otherwise left chained to the cellar floor of obscurity with only their puddles of lumpy, oatmeal-like filth to keep them company. Better that I spend the days filming my own bowel movements than continue to sink my hopes and dreams into financial money pits of sub-WATERWORLD proportions because the films of mine that have been successful, that have been embraced, that are loved the world over are never the ones I put a single shred of thought or time into. And such a film is MY DOG HAS A CYST.

It was a film (or more precisely a video) shot over a decade ago. With a running time of less than two minutes, it took as long to make as it does to watch. And yet this odd little film has seen more festival exposure than all of my other films combined. Many has been the time I've asked the festival programmers "Don't you want to see this other movie of mine with the dialogue and the talking and the funny, done on the very expensive 16mm film?" "No," they would respond, "We want to see the dog with the hairy, putrid growth. It touches our sensibilities and stirs our spirit and blood as to weaken our hearts and fill us with a pleasant melancholy." To see the short that has done nothing for my career but paint me in the corner of being a twisted creep click here.

The Dogs Behind The Cyst

Now that you have seen the film that has set the world on fire, I know what you are asking: What happened to the dog? Where is it now? And did I eat it? No, the dog was not eaten; that is just a filthy stereotype foisted upon hard-working Filipinos when in fact it should be foisted upon the backward, barbarian Koreans who have also been known to eat monkeys and would mate with ducks were it physically possible. No, the story of the dog is steeped in Ecarma family history, at a time when we were all much happier and housed a group of low-maintenance canines that were either violently insane or possibly large Mexican rats. Our elder dog was Yogi, a mixed medium-sized terrier; later she was joined by Pupeye, a psychotic, and badly trained golden retriever and after him was Bear, a crazed mutt of indeterminate heritage. They served the Family Ecarma well and kept us safe from dangerous thieves and killers when they weren't cowering in the corner, hiding under the furniture or peeing on the rugs.

The dogs were with us for quite some time, but as Winter becomes Fall, soon it was time for our dogs to pass on. But instead of going off with the natural majestic grace of an Old Yeller or Lassie, they all went shrieking like banshees as they were dragged kicking and screaming into death's bony grasp.

Pupeye was the first to go. Bought by our father, he left it to us, his young sons, to train the animal into a devastating, canine kill-machine. Unfortunately, we were all quite thick and could not be trusted to sit the right way on a toilet so our training consisted of stuffing the dog into boxes, poking it with sticks and attempting to jam pencils in its nose.

With no training or discipline of any kind, Pupeye reverted to his feral instincts and would spend his days gnawing, chewing and eating anything that wasn't bolted down until the fateful day it gnawed, chewed and ate something it really shouldn't have. Sprawled on the laundry room floor where we kept out dogs, we found the poor beast moaning one morning with the entire linoleum floor smeared with blood. It turned out the dog had digested something sharp and pointy and it had started rip apart his insides; the blood finally came out the dog's ass and he had spent night wiping the floor with his blood-soaked anal mop in a desperate attempt to dull the pain.

The vet told us Pupeye had only days to live. For whatever reason, my father chose not to put the dog to sleep but to instead wait for it to die in the comfort of home and tenderly wrapped the dog in a disused blanket to soak up any excess bodily discharge. A day or two later, Pupeye passed on and was buried in the backyard.

The next to go was Bear a couple of years later. A replacement for Pupeye, Bear was a shifty, lazy beast that would spend his days lying in the shade being fed upon by parasites. One day, Bear began to piss uncontrollably and soon the floor to the laundry room was a gigantic yellow puddle. The dog was much older than we had been led to believe and was only days away from dying. Once again, we brought Bear back home to pass away peacefully after we had squeegeed all the piss from the back seat of my dad's car. Like Pupeye before, Bear died and was also buried in the backyard.

Finally, it was Yogi's turn. We had her for over 20 years but our Iron Man of a dog was on her last legs. Arthritis had ravaged her joints so she had to be carried outside or propped up with two by fours; it hurt for her to walk, it hurt for her to breath, it hurt for her to even be. And on top of this was THE CYST.

It started out small, like a pimple. But soon it began to grow and swell, getting larger every day. I'm not sure what was inside it, but one day I found that the cyst had popped a leak and Yogi was lapping up the yellow puss. Yogi seemed to enjoy it. An operation was out of the question, as the procedure would surely kill the dog.

In any case, Yogi could no longer function and spent its days and nights howling, begging to be killed. Finally, my dad relented and decided it was time to put Yogi to sleep. But instead of bringing the dog to a qualified vet, Dad decided to do the deed himself, figuring that since he's a certified human doctor that would certainly qualify him as a certified dog doctor. So that night, Dad brought home the mother load of painkillers and pumped Yogi with enough medication to kill roughly fifty people or just Marlon Brando.

Unfortunately, the tragic flaw in my Dad's logic became brutally apparent when Yogi survived the night with the only ill effects being listlessness and a craving for cheetos. Dad doubled the dose that evening, and when that failed, tripled the dose the following evening . This did nothing to Yogi who merely snorted and requested a second helping of corn chips with a side order of bean dip.

This went on for a couple of days with my dad upping the dosage every night, and upping it the next when the dog refused to die. Finally, my younger brother Victor got wind of all this and outraged that our last surviving pet was being turned into a running gag, put his foot down. My father's crazed dog doping career was over and Yogi rewarded this act of kindness with days and nights of unstoppable screeching until even Victor was prepared to snap the dog's neck himself. All the while, Dad refused to bring the dog to the vet or even permit us to cave the dog's head in with a large rock. After two nerve-wracking weeks, Yogi died. She was wrapped in a blanket like the others and buried in the backyard next to Pupeye and Bear.

That was 1991. It's been over ten years and we still have yet to buy another pet. The laundry room is now exclusively used for laundry and the only reminders we have left of our trio of canines are the "Beware of Dog" sign on our fence and the odd pungent stink of blood and piss that fills the laundry room on moist humid days. Maybe the Ecarma family wasn't meant to own dogs, perhaps gerbils or a trained lemurs who play the maracas are more our speed. But nothing will replace those poor, misbegotten animals in our hearts. And whenever we look at the meaningless warning sign or smell the sickly sweet tang of the animal death that has seeped into our house's very foundation, we'll think of Yogi, Pupeye, and Bear- the finest dogs that ever lived.

Alvin is a prolific, Washington, D.C.-based filmmaker whose short films have appeared in such festivals as the Chicago Underground, the San Francisco Asian American and the Johns Hopkins Film Festivals among others. Alvin is currently working on his zero-budget debut feature LETHAL FORCE.