Watched: 10/07/2023
Format: Amazon
Viewing: First and Last
Director: i don't care
Here's a thing I didn't know until last night: for all the complaints about the connected universe of Marvel movies, there's been a universe of movies out there that live somewhere just below the Air Bud/ Buddies franchise and just above the world of movies like A Talking Cat !?!. This franchise stars the brother of Kevin James (who, before I realized he actually is the brother of Kevin James referred to him as "Dollar Store Kevin James") and a yellow lab that doesn't really wise-crack so much as just say shit to fill awkward spaces.
At the end of the movie, it was agreed: despite having seen movies like Santa With Muscles, Bailey the Christmas Hero and innumerable other absolute pieces of shit movies - this one was just offensively bad and maybe one of the worst. And Dug, K, Jamie and I curate bad movies.
It's hard to say what makes a bad movie. We can all have a chuckle at a misfire that shoots too high and misses, or is just misguided (see: Cats). And I know some folks find it distasteful to enjoy the swing-and-a-miss of a no-budget movie that just wasn't ever going to work (see: most of MST3K's fodder). And I appreciate the bottom-feeders of the Hollywood ecosystem who have found a way to generate money by making absolute trash they clearly shot over 3-5 days, making it up as they went along, and being savvy enough to make something someone will accidentally pay to see (see: Santa's Summer House).
But this movie seems somehow even more cynical. It's depending on parents to see the formula of Holiday + Talking Animal, covered by everyone from Disney to fly-by-night sometimes soft-pornographers, and leaving their kid in front of the TV without caring at all what plays on screen in a post Air Bud/ Buddies world.
It's not even an entertaining bit of stuff on screen, except, perhaps, in a sort of deconstructionist way. It's a movie that borrows heavily and obviously from other movies (better movie is inherent in that statement), having the gall to borrow from the 80's Dante staple The 'Burbs and, at it's worst and only briefly, from Rear Window - without understanding anything about those movies and why they're watchable.
I don't know if you can characterize Valentine having a career and stealing from his brother's popular sitcom King of Queens as nepotism - James isn't in this and I don't think lent himself to the movie in any capacity. But viewers of this film and King of Queens should be aware both borrowed from innumerable sitcoms before this by casting a schlub with a hot, patient-but-scoldy wife, and the schlub is kind of locked into a certain moronic "boy, ain't men dumb?" mentality that was forged with The Honeymooners and has been sanctified through the decades. The husband has an idea or scheme everyone has to put up with, etc...*
In this case it's Gary Valentine as the schlub and Elisa Donovan of Clueless fame as the hot wife. The titular dog is the family yellow lab who comments on events like a Greek Chorus. It is unclear if the audience can hear the dog or if only Gary Valentine can hear him or everyone hears the dog... because no one reacts. As near as I can tell, they shot every scene, then grabbed some B-roll, then had the voice actor riff, lazily and badly, over the dog looking like he was waiting for a cookie.
That's the whole set-up for what I think is something like 6 feature films, 3 of which focus on Christmas somehow. It's mind-melting.
The lead dog, "Zeus", is voiced by Joey Lawrence, if you want to know what Joey Lawrence is doing with his time. There's a different dog voiced by brain-scientist and actor Mayim Bialik,
It's absolutely strange filler content that has actual name actors in it, alongside Working Actors(tm) and a yellow labrador retriever who doesn't seem to much trained as just patient and happy to be with people. So it's an exercise not so much in "let's make a movie!" as "let's exploit the system and get paid" in a way that the executives at Hallmark would find breathtaking.
The "villain" of the movie is no less than Lance Henriksen who clearly didn't bother to learn his lines until the absolute last second, kind of stumbling his way through them in the way that says "you idiots did rewrites, and I am not dealing with this for a movie about a dog." We also get 80's-staple Curtis Armstrong as a wacky neighbor and one of the many signifiers that this movie has the balls to think we've seen the prior two to understand the relationship between he and Valentine here. You'll also get former Superman Dean Cain paired with a Joey Diaz, who is one of those "types" actors you've seen in 50 things, but you don't know his name. The pair were also imported from a prior movie in the series, and, again, a *lot* is assumed about our enthusiasm for the prior installments wherein the pair kidnapped someone?
I won't get into every neighbor, who are all there to rightfully hate Valentine's character, who is there to make you realize: holy shit, I never really realized before what a charisma-free Kevin James might be like.
Of course the entire plot of the movie is a series of dumb-ass misunderstandings to the point where you have to do work to even get what the main characters think is happening. But let's just say, we repeatedly referred to the film as "Nextdoor: The Movie" as neighbors assumed batshit things were happening over at the neighbors and wanted to take vigilante-ish and wildly irresponsible action to handle it.
Shot in Louisville, Kentucky, I've now learned Louisville is gorgeous by ignoring what was happening on screen sometimes and looking at the background. The sets, I believe, are real homes rented for the film. I'm pretty sure the Haunted Mansion is a few different houses, one of which seems to be the reading room in a B'n'B of a particular religious person who was willing to let them set-dress the room where they hold bible study, if all the crosses and pictures of the wee baby Jesus were any indication.
Sometimes I think I can get what a movie was trying to be or what went wrong, but here, I think this almost feels like anti-audience performance art. Like, they actively hate the kind of movie they set out to make, so they can't be bothered to try. Individually, you've seen a lot of the cast turn in great performances. This ain't it.
This movie had a budget. I can't say what it was, but they had enough to pull name talent, work out-of-state and whatnot. What they couldn't bother to do was the absolute basics of making sure they'd written something a human would want to see. Yes, we get a scene with a man wiping dog shit all over his face like that is a thing one would not realize he was doing, and we get a weird, shared moment of horniness between father and son as the blonde neighbor drops by, and we get Gary Valentine tripping all over the fucking place. But we don't get a single funny line, a single joke that makes any sense, or a single character that one might enjoy in any way.
I guess what's so weird is that this movie probably wouldn't exist if Gary Valentine weren't related to Kevin James. Maybe it would. I don't know. But there's a budget attached to this pile that was spent mostly, I guess, on actors. It sure wasn't spent on the screenplay. But someone went out and got Lance Henriksen and other people whom you know. And then this is what they did. And you will be left wondering: who was this for? Why did they do this? Are they angry at me? Are they angry at Dean Cain? Do they hate dogs? It feels like they hate dogs and cats.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out that this movie features about three dozen fart jokes and the star has a broken foot but they just went with it.
I hate my personal choices sometimes.
*I'm not sure Kevin Can F**k Himself was the definitive answer to these sitcom tropes we'd hoped for, but it was a fascinating response to something we've all taken as SOP on our TV's
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