Twenty-five years after being banned in Thailand for being “offensive to all religions”, Ing K’s black comedy DogGod has been re-edited, unbanned and showcased in film festivals around the globe. Its Australian premiere at Monster Fest 2026 was to a half-filled theatre on a Saturday afternoon—a strikingly unfitting context—but the movie’s ireful satire, shoestring aesthetics and shockingly incisive political diagnoses transformed and transcended this humble setting. 

DogGod seeks to challenge the power and corruption of religious institutions, and its plot, which is probably its weakest filmic component, is a simple infrastructure that exists to justify this criticism. The film’s protagonist, Robin (Krissada Sukosol Clapp), enlists the help of cult investigator Victor (Brian Bennett) to recover his wife, Cherry Pie (Fiona Tarini Graham) from a new-age dog-worshipping religious cult. At the Ashram of Boundless Love, the cult’s residence, Robin and Victor immerse themselves in their absurd rituals—eating from dog bowls, howling at the moon and divining lotto numbers from dog shit—to expose the movement’s artifice and save Cherry Pie.

Although the dog worshipping is an obvious example of the film’s amusingly over-the-top, mocking style of comedy, director Ing K got more creative and critical than this to curate the film’s absurd tone. The opening scene depicts an abbot excusing a monk’s necrophilia in an impressive display of mental gymnastics and religious misinterpretations: invoking the witness to find peace by emptying his mind, suggesting the monk was meditating about death and even saying that it was acceptable because the corpse was a man’s, not a woman’s, and therefore not sacrilegious. The witness, also a monk, then burns his robe and walks into the sea as Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries plays, the first of many laudably ludicrous scoring choices (later, Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 soundtracks Robin reminiscing about Cherry Pie—so camp, especially with the jump cuts and visible changes in lighting).

The editing is likewise unserious, with minutes-long quasi-religious monologues (which occasionally dragged on long enough for the camp to deliquesce to tedium) and numerous eye-level close shots of characters delivering the most unfathomably odd lines straight down the barrel. It was utterly Waters-esque. Even the patently bad taste of a suicidal character existing solely for comic effect and to mock the West’s orientalist fascination with alternative/Eastern religions reminded me of Waters’ notoriously bad taste early films. 

DogGod is a film clearly made outside of mainstream film production. Dr Daniel Sussott, who played one of the cult’s lead spiritual gurus and was a special guest at the Monster Fest screening, recounted in the post-film Q&A how the film’s budget was zero, and the film certainly felt like it at times. The acting was not particularly good, but this often worked with the shoestring aesthetic and gritty 16mm film, and the sincere over-delivery of the lines reminded me of Waters’ Dreamlanders. In the Q&A, Dr Sussott later recollected getting baked during a scene involving him, in full drag, smoking through a penis-shaped joint holder—the spirit of indie filmmaking!

Nonetheless, DogGod is seething in its political and religious commentary, and it’s this substance more than anything which got it banned in Thailand all those years ago. Whilst the dog-worshipping cult is a mockery of most organised religions with its manipulation, brainwashing and pseudo-spiritual gibberish, the film’s real bite comes at the end when the cult’s lead guru asks whether it is truly less sensical to worship a dog instead of any other God or icon, especially when established religions are patently so corrupt. The dog, she claims, is a symbol of peace, rest, daydreaming and fun—if religion is simply “spiritual theatre”, would this not be a more meaningful way of life than what any other religion proposes? As I take it, DogGod is not critiquing religion. It is critiquing the corruption, manipulation and exploitation that mires certain religious institutions. The fact that the Thai censorship body deemed this “offensive to all religions” is less an indictment of the film and more an indictment of all religions.

Although initially set for release in 1997, DogGod’s themes and critiques are still applicable today, even in a largely atheist country like Australia. It demands us to consider: who or what are people worshipping—or being manipulated into—now? Contrived images of an idealised lifestyle? The hateful politics of One Nation (or those parties even further right)? Tech giants’ promises of a near-future AI utopia? There will always be people exploiting their position of power to manipulate the masses; there will always be masses whose need for security, guidance and meaning makes them susceptible to manipulation. Despite the film’s unrelenting unseriousness, DogGod’s final message is a sobering one: a reminder to be critically agentive in a world antagonistic to political and spiritual autonomy.