Pups Alone is about a widower inventor and his daughter and dog who gets a new job with a pet tech company, which moves him out to a gated community. When they get there, one of their neighbors, Dolph, discovers that the widower has an invention that translates a dog's thoughts into words, so he hatches a plan: while everyone who works for the company is at the Christmas retreat in Big Bear, he'll hire two bumbling crooks, one of whom is Nicholas Turturro, to steal the invention. At the same time, the widower's dog is staying behind, and when he gets wise to the bumbling thieves' intentions, he gathers up the rest of the neighborhood dogs to use the widower's Rube Goldberg contraptions to stop them.
And that's it... or is it? No that's like a fraction of it, there are also endless minutes of padding, endless scenes where the dialog goes on too long, and endless bad jokes like dogs farting in people's faces and blind elderly women getting robbed. They even used this cartoon story board device to advance the plot, and it was still too weighed down. "But Matt," you say, "this is a kids movie, of course you're going to be bored!" I hear you, so I went to a site called Parent Movie Review, which was listed on the critic reviews for this, to get a different perspective. Here is what the reviewer, Savannah Lee, had to say about her 5-year-old son's reaction to this: "my 5-year-old spent the whole run time jumping on the couch, leaving the room to find toys to play with, and just generally being uninterested. For a film to not even be able to hold his attention is a feat unto itself." And there you have it. I think even as a Dolph completists, the novelty of seeing him in Christmas sweaters or dressed like Santa--or playing, as Mitch put it, the Richard Kind scheming character--is tough for the kind of slog this movie is, and maybe that sums it up best.
Dolph Lundgren is 65 years old, and now has 65 films reviewed on this site. No one else has their age number of films reviewed, Gary Daniels is closest with 56 films at 59 years old. Since I started the site, we've called Dolph the Babe Ruth of DTV action, but with the numbers he's amassed, maybe the Wayne Gretzky of DTV is more apt. Either way, with the volume of Dolph we already have here, there was no way I couldn't do this film, so whether it was good or bad I was stuck with it. That being said, Dolph playing against type was on its own a fun thing to see. Mitch's Richard Kind comparison was the most apt, only he played him as a kind of hyped-up jock type, slapping the widower on the back and generally being rough with him like William Zabka in an 80s teen movie. During this DTVC journey we've seen Dolph fighting with foam sharks, wearing a toga in a Christian movie, playing the drums in a rock band, and even acting opposite TV talk show hosts Montel Williams and Jerry Springer in separate non-related films. Christmas movie was one of the few feathers he didn't have in his cap yet, so now he has it. I guess "you're welcome"?
The thing about the modern Christmas movie, is most are made assembly-line style for companies like Hallmark that need to pump out a bunch. We'll grab some former stars from the Island of Misfit Actors, find a nice, quaint, Canadian town to pass as an American one, then use any of three or four paradigms to create a nice 80-minute story that fits the beats of the constant commercial breaks modern TV has here in the States. While it sounds crass, one side benefit is no matter how rough the movie is, it'll always get us out on time. I think that's why my wife and I enjoy them. Here's Brandon Routh, former Superman, playing a kind, cooky fireman who needs to find homes for 9 kittens that were abandoned at the fire station. Oh wait, his former love interest is a vet who just happens to be home for the holidays? Sure, it's contrived, but Brandon Routh is fun, and again, the film gets us in and out on time. Because this move was DTV instead of made-for-TV, it had no such constraints; but couldn't there have been someone saying "this is too much?" One thing I know I get from the Hallmark Christmas movie is a modicum of restraint. Usually I'd like to see Nicholas Turturro mentally calling his agent while doing a scene where he has to pretend to react to having a dog farting in his face, but when the scene goes on forever, it becomes too much.
The other piece of this is the talking dog aspect, which is usually an easy element to make work and anchor a movie like this around. The problem is, it too was kind of all over the place. First off, as Mitch pointed out, the dogs were kind of nondescript. I mean, I really liked Charlie, the star dog, but even he had a pulled-off-the-street quality to him. Pulled-off-the-street is good if I'm out and see someone walking their dog, at that point any dog who's jaunting around and sniffing things is great. But in a movie it takes on an early 90s shot on video with the director's friends kind of movie quality. Beyond that, the actual dog action was weird. There was this construct where Danny Trejo's bulldog character was the leader, or "Dogfather," and he had the other dogs harassing Charlie. It was an odd construct that weighed the film down in ways it didn't need. Then they tried to do the "dog hates the mailman" thing, but it was Charlie attacking the mailman, which I wasn't sure if in that case it was supposed to be an applause scene? Who likes to see mail workers attacked by dogs? And how does that endear me to our star dog any more? Animals should be an easy win for a movie, but here they ended up being another misstep.
Finally, as we've been doing lately, I want to get back to Dolph for a second paragraph to look at where we stand with his career. At 65, the next stop on the Dolph Train is the 70 Club. With that in mind, I have Section 8, Operation Seawolf, and 4Got10 all watched and ready to review. We also have Expendables 3 which I still have only done on a podcast episode, and then Sharknado 5, which only has him in a cameo, but he's in it. But would we want to review that for his 70th film? I checked, and for his 60th we did Female Fight Club, and that was a milestone as well because it was the last Dolph DTV flick I needed to watch--and depending on how you count Seal Team, I'm still caught up ahead of his 2023 releases. Looking at our past with him, we've also done some of his big screen releases, like The Expendables and Rocky IV, so Expendables 4 is probably in play as well. As I said above, it's been a great journey, and based on his upcoming projects, not one that's going to end anytime soon on his side, so it feels like it's on us to keep the site going so we can continue to catalog them.
And with that, let's wrap this up. This will unfortunately go down as one of the more difficult entries in our need to catalog all of Dolph's films here on the site. As of this writing, you can get this free on the Roku Channel here in the States. If you feel the need to dive in, I suggest planning multiple sits, maybe three or four. And to hear us discuss the film in more detail, you can check out our episode in the podcast archives. It was another fun episode, and great to have Mitch on as always!
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6344584
And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!
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