Bad Dog (Movie)!

When I brought this movie home I was pretty sure I had a winner. Char enjoyed Space Buddies; she howled when Budderball farted in his space suit, and I had no reason to think Spooky Buddies would be any different.

As a teacher, I have learned that you never play any video (DVD, YouTube clip, or video streaming) for a class without previewing the entire thing first. But I thought I could just pop Spooky Buddies in and sit back. I mean, c'mon, look at these puppies. How could this go wrong? The movie is rated G for crying out loud.

Well, if I had previewed even seven minutes of this film I would have known better.

In those first seven minutes Char and I watched Warwick the Warlock summon the Halloween Hound, a demon dog with fiery eyes. The Halloween Hound appeared on the "other side" of a mirror, and the only way he can enter our world is by eating the souls of five puppies. So, Warwick the Warlock brought him puppies.

Yes, you read that right. Charlotte watched in horror as the first puppy was pushed in front of the Halloween Hound's mirror. After the Halloween Hound had consumed the puppy's soul, the puppy's body turned into stone. And no, this isn't a Halloween trick. The puppies were killed, their souls were eaten, and their bodies were turned into stone.

The final puppy to be sacrificed, Pip, did escape, but he was quickly caught by Warwick and killed in front of Joseph, the young boy who owned Pip. With tears running his face, Joseph hugged his stone dog and cried to his dad, "Look what they did to Pip!" In a later scene, you can see that the townspeople have recycled the puppy bodies into headstones in the cemetery.

The only bright spot in the movie's exposition is that the Halloween Hound doesn't eat Pip's puppy soul. Pip becomes a ghost instead, and he's left to haunt an empty house for the next 75 years.

If I had written this plot and explained it to my wife, I'm pretty sure her reaction would have been to punch me in the face.

Charlotte, as you can imagine, did not like Spooky Buddies. I was scrambling to find the remote as soon as the puppies started dying, and we quickly turned the TV off. As I put the DVD case on a shelf, a high shelf, I assured Char that by the end of the movie all the animals would be fine, and all the kids who lost their pets would get them back. But I wasn't so sure. I didn't trust the movie.

And for a little while Char didn't trust her dad. When I'd bring a new movie home from the library, Char would eye it suspiciously and ask, "Dad, this isn't like Spooky Buddies is it?"

"No, no, this one's good."