Critical Reception
The film was not well received by critics on release. Roger Ebert gave the film a zero-star rating, noting:
Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.... Mad Dog Time should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor.
Roger Ebert and partner Gene Siskel on their television show Siskel & Ebert at the Movies voted this the worst film of 1996. Ebert repeated his written statement that watching this movie was not preferable to 1 hour and 45 minutes of looking at a blank wall, and mentioned how upset he was that Siskel won the right to choose this film after a coin toss, so he had to pick the second worst film of the year, Un indien dans la ville (Little Indian, Big City), a film Ebert also gave zero stars. Siskel said that he still did not know what the film was about even 6 months after he saw it, and said that because in addition to starring in the film, Richard Dreyfuss is listed as a co-producer on the film, he deserves most of the blame for helping get the story on screen.
A New York Times review of Nov. 8, 1996 by Stephen Holden called Mad Dog Time "a rat's nest of hip pretensions posing as a comedy."
In Entertainment Weekly on Nov. 22, 1996, reviewer Ken Tucker described it as "jaw-droppingly incoherent."
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