5.6.14

IHAO on ... Lenny the Wonder Dog

/\// tOrtUrE-jEssEl-A-thOn \\/\



Rotten Tomatoes - Critics -- ; Audience 39%
Flickchart - n/a
IMDB - 3.5 rating
Metacritic - n/a
Amazon.com - 3.0 stars (with only two reviews, one a 1 star, and one a joke review at 5 stars)

Those stats are not very good.  Let's see if I cannot find something else to help out before we jump in.  Ahh, here we go, a clip of Craig Ferguson, actor and villain of the film, talking about it:

Note to self: Get Boat Trip

If that isn't the best little interview and reason to watch this movie, I don't know what is.  Not only that, but this one was donation fodder!  That's right, I was PAID to watch this movie and add it to my collection.  So you know its gotta be bad.  And it is.  It very very much is.

The story here is that a scientist made a chip that makes dogs smart, put it in his dog so a more evil scientist can't steal it, and the dog, Lenny, runs off and finds an androgynous child and then they stop the evil scientist, Craig Ferguson.  Also, this movie exists in a world where cartoons are a drug and many people go to rehab for it.  Oh, and Michael Winslow plays a cop again.

This movie is awful.  Purely and terribly awful.  The music is ridiculous video game out-of-place songs, all of it too loud and mixed terribly so watching it makes it almost impossible to hear the dialogue when the music is playing.  The film "looks good" because when shot on a nicer camera, of course it looks good.  But it isn't shot well at all, with a bunch of terrible angles or just pointless ones.  The lighting is mostly garbage, and there are a lot of lighting gags.  But it is garbage because it is inconsistent, and noticeable.  You want those little things to be stuff the regular, non-critic viewing audience doesn't notice.  The plot and characters are nonsensical at best and just absolutely ridiculous and terrible at worst.  

Well don't be THAT harsh, gif!

To say something nice, there are a LOT of jokes thrown at you here ... and a pretty good amount of them are actually funny.  Way more of them are unintentionally funny, as is most of the movie.  But there are some jokes that, while they don't make any sense logically, are truly hilarious, like Hanky and Panky, the two "identical twin" henchmen, one of them has a terrible lisp (in that his performance is awful) and is a recovering cartoon addict, and the other is so tall and muscular his head is never in the shot.  See, the head-never-in-the-shot gag, that's a funny gag.  But their names, the terrible lisp, their awful costuming ... nothing else works correctly.  There's a difference between a joke working and the audience laughing.  And this movie straddles that line ... then falls off onto the "utter garbage" side of filmmaking.  They even skip an entire cut scene with a terrible cartoon comic-book-style storyboard of the fight.

This movie is perfect, is what I'm trying to say.  Perfect to watch and make fun of, perfectly terrible but earnest in its attempt to make a good family film, perfect to even watch it fail at its Capri-Sun product placement.  Filled with jokes that don't work because of the execution and filmmaking, filled with over-acting, filled with the WORST speed up chase scenes I've seen in a film in a very long time.  And I enjoyed every minute of it.  This is that kind of perfect bad, that good bad, the Nanar I've talked about in the past.  I was not expecting to get a nanar film on my torturous watching spree, but man am I glad I did.  I definitely say give this movie a shot if you find it somewhere and want to laugh.  But don't expect anything good.  This is the worst made film of the week so far, but the one I like the most, too.

Grade: F+

  • June 3rd – Gigli (from Rachel Runion)  Grade: C
  • June 4th – Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (from Joel Gould)  Grade: D--
  • June 5th – Lenny the Wonder Dog (from Jason Schmidt)  Grade: F+
  • June 6th – The Cat in the Hat (from Josh Hendricks)
  • June 7th – The Cat from Outer Space (from Nicole Clockel)
  • June 8th – Popeye (from Drew Turner)
  • June 9th – SURPRISE JESSEL'S ALMOST-MOST HATED MOVIE!!

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