Watch Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell For Free

So much average

Perfect cast and a good story

Admirable film.

Absolutely Fantastic

1978 was the year of the evil dog in Hollywood. After all, the same year that brought us "Devil Dog" also brought us "Dracula's Dog"! However, in this latter case the dog isn't a vampire dog but was apparently the spawn of Satan's dog...and like thefan-2 points out, it's a bit like "Rosemary's Baby"! When the film begins, some weirdos buy a showdog that is in season. Next, you see these same weirdos performing a demonic ceremony with their new pooch. Fortunately, the camera cuts away before the big impregnation scene! Next, one of the weirdos shows up in a nice residential neighborhood and gives two kids a puppy...and you can only assume it's from the litter with the showdog and the Devil Dog (or perhaps from an unholy coupling with Satan himself!). At first, things seem okay. However, over time the nice family who adopts the doggy start to become a family of real jerks. First, the two kids become nasty brutes. Second, the wife becomes a cold- hearted nympho! The only one left who is normal is dad (Richard Crenna)...and he eventually realizes his family ain't normal! But is it too late for him to put a stop to all this...especially once people start dying...and, after his wife and kids become full- fledged members of Satan's army?!Considering that this is NOT supposed to be great art and simply a silly horror film, it's a movie that you should cut some slack. Sure, it's silly...but it's not meant to be anything else. And, for an evil doggy film, it's actually pretty good...although the special effects near the end were pretty laughable!

Devil Dog, Hound of Hell- ReviewRichard Crenna really pulls this television movie together with his portrayal of a Husband/Father trying to save his family from the Devil Dog. The whole time I was watching this movie, I kept wondering why Richard Crenna looked so familiar. It turns out Richard Crenna played Colonel Trautman in the first three Rambo movies.As a quick synopsis this movie has what appears at first to be a simple plot: A family gets a new dog; the dog is evil; the dog mind controls the kids and wife and makes them worship the devil; and, then the father vanquishes the evil dog and saves his family.But is this really a movie about a Devil Dog? Or, does it contain a hidden M. Night Shyamalan-like twist, making this movie really about Richard Crenna's character's mid-life crisis, in which a man loses touch with and control over his family? This might seem like a bit of a stretch but bear with me and my analysis. The movie opens with Richard Crenna, who is a man working later and later hours at work and who drives home to discover that the beloved family dog has been run over. Later his kids unilaterally choose to bring a new dog into the household. His long serving house maid begs him to get rid of the new dog. The man ignores his house maid and she later dies. His friend/neighbor of 15 years begs him to get rid of the new dog. The man ignores his neighbor and the neighbor later dies. The man even contemplates hurting himself with a lawnmower while the dog watches.Later in the movie, Richard Crenna is working late again and his wife calls him and tells him that the kids are acting strange and begs him to come home. Richard Crenna ignores his wife (as he likely has ignored similar requests in the past). As a result he finds out that his kids have been changing under his nose, they have been having behavioral problems at school. His wife is changing under his nose, she becomes sexually promiscuous and tries seducing his friends. Later his wife and kids start living a "new life" without him. They spend all hours of the night engaging in weird paintings and activities. Richard Crenna blames the dog for his estrangement from his family and tries to get rid of the dog. His family screams that they hate the father/husband. Ultimately the family won't let him get rid of the dog.Richard Crenna fears that something is wrong with him so he seeks medical advice. Physically he is healthy, but he is diagnosed with potential mental problems. Richard Crenna rejects psychological help and tells his wife that there is nothing wrong with him and instead fixates on the "evil dog". Ultimately, Richard Crenna's mid-life crisis reaches its climax and he flees the country and sits out in the South American wilderness contemplating his problem and seeking help from a native spiritual adviser.Returning home to "face his demons", Richard Crenna encounters the Devil Dog. Richard Crenna says" I'll choose the location of our battle". The location he chooses is his work. The very place that he was spending too much time at, to the detriment of his family-life, is where he chooses to resolve his problem. It is there that Richard Crenna faces down the "evil dog"/mid-life crisis and in doing so makes it disappear. Having faced his demons, Richard Crenna returns home to find his loving family has missed him. The movie ends with this workaholic taking a vacation with his family. Finally Richard Crenna has given his family the time and attention that they deserve and as a result his mid/life crisis has ended. But before the movie ends, the son cautions Richard Crenna that there are other "devil dogs" out there. In other words, Richard Crenna may have other crisis to face, but hopefully in a more appropriate manner.So was there really ever a "Devil Dog" or was this just a manifestation of Richard Crenna's anxiety over losing touch with his family? An argument can be made that the "Devil Dog" does not directly on screen attack any other character in the movie. Nor does the movie explicitly demonstrate that the "Devil Dog" really has any special powers or abilities. All of the weird things that happen in the movie can be explained away as coincidence or hallucinations in Richard Crenna's sick mind.

I remember Devil Dog playing on TBS almost 20 years ago, and my older sister and her friends watching it and laughing all the next day. It's not that bad for a made-for-TV horror movie, but it is derivative (mostly of The Exorcist) and businesslike, for lack of a better word. It won't blow you away with artful cinematography or great acting, but it's not a waste of time, either. It's the kind of movie you watch to kill a couple of hours when you aren't in the mood to think too hard.However, if you go into the movie looking for some laughs, you won't be disappointed. The early scenes, with Lucky the Devil Dog as a cute little puppy with Children of the Damned eyes are hilariously non-threatening, and the climactic blue-screen effects of a giant black dog (with horns!) are pretty side-splitting. And keep an eye out for the cloaked Satanist in Maverick shades toward the beginning.Not a great horror film by any stretch of the imagination, but I wish they still made stuff like this for TV.

I ran across this several years ago while channel surfing on a Sunday afternoon. Though it was obviously a cheesy TV movie from the 70s, the direction and score were well done enough that it grabbed my attention, and indeed I was hooked and had to watch it through to the end. I recently got the opportunity to buy a foreign DVD of this film (oops, didn't notice a domestic one had finally come out a couple months prior), and was very pleased to be able to watch it again (and in its entirety).I don't wholly understand the phenomenon, but somehow the 70s seem to have a lock on horror movies that are actually scary. The decades prior to the 70s produced some beautifully shot films and the bulk of our enduring horror icons, but are they actually scary? No, not very. Likewise in the years since the 70s we've gotten horror movies that are cooler, more exciting, have much better production values and sophisticated special effects, are more fun, funnier, have effective "jump" moments, and some very creative uses of gore, but again... they aren't really scary! There's just something about the atmosphere of the 70s horror films. The grainy film quality. The spookily dark scenes unilluminated by vast high-tech lighting rigs. The "edge of dreamland" muted quality of the dialogue and the weird and stridently EQ'd scores. The odd sense of unease and ugliness permeating everything. Everything that works to undermine most movies of the 70s, in the case of horror, works in its favor.Specifically, in this film, the quiet, intense shots of the devil dog staring people down is fairly unnerving. So much more effective than if they had gone the more obvious route of having the dog be growling, slavering, and overtly hostile ("Cujo"?). The filmmakers wisely save that for when the dog appears in its full-on supernatural form. The effects when that occurs, while unsophisticated by today's standards, literally gave me chills. The bizarre, vaguely-defined, "I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at" look intuitively strikes me as more like how a real supernatural vision would be, rather than the hyper-real, crystal clear optical printer / digital compositor confections of latter-day horror films.While the human characters in this film are not as satisfyingly rendered as their nemesis or the world they inhabit, the actors all do a decent job. The pairing of the brother and sister from the "Witch Mountain" movies as, yes, brother and sister, is a rather cheesy bit of stunt casting, but they do fine. Yvette Mimieux always manages to be entertaining if unspectacular. Richard Crenna earns more and more empathy from the audience as the film progresses. His self-doubt as he wonders whether his family's alienness is truly due to a supernatural plot or whether he's merely succumbing to paranoid schizophrenia is pretty well handled, though his thought that getting a routine physical may provide an explanation for what he's been experiencing is absurd in its naïveté.The movie's The-End-Question-Mark type ending is one of the only ones I've seen that doesn't feel like a cheap gimmick, and actually made me think about the choices these characters would be faced with next and what they'd be likely to do and how they'd feel about it.Detractors of this film may say it's merely a feature-length vehicle for some neato glowing retina shots, but hey, you could say the same thing about "Blade Runner". :-)