Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978, Curtis Harrington)

"A dog that is a minion of Satan terrorizes a suburban family."

Within the first 10 minutes of this film we are seeing a group of satanists doing something evil with a dog. I have no idea what they actually do or why but it seems that they put a very evil force into the dog. The dog then has 10 puppies and one of those puppies just happens to fall into the hands of a perfect suburban family. You can imagine what happens from here on.

Devil Dog seems to have been a TV movie that aired on Halloween night in 1978. I imagine that in it's time it was responsible for a lot of nightmares and to this day holds a lot of painful memories for a lot of kids. However as of now the movie is just ridiculous. This dog isn't just the evil killing dog, as in Cujo, no. This dog has mind control powers! He controls people to kill themselves, paint pictures of a devil in blood, worship the devil, become sneaky, and win the school election by framing the lead candidate! So basically this dog is a dick. No one notices it except for the dad of the family and he decides that he must stop it through um.....drawing something on his hand in Ecuador.

Yup, this movie is awesome. I hate when people call a lot of these movies horrible or cheesy and mention laughing at them in a MST3K type of way. I really don't think that even a film like Devil Dog deserves this treatment. It's not that bad, its just ridiculous. In my book, bad and ridiculous mean two very different things but it seems it means the same thing to a lot of people. The reason I liked this movie was because it was so ridiculous in fact. The ridiculousness runs so high through out the movie and this just makes the film a lot of fun, at least to me.

Give me a scene where a dog controlls someones mind to put their hand in a lawnmower and I am there enjoying the hell out of myself. Devil Dog is filled with these scenes and it's just a lot of fun. However after saying this, I don't think that Devil Dog is that great. It's a "b movie" but its not a great one or even a good one. The plot goes everywhere and the whole time you are just scratching your head at how inconsistent the film is. It basically just doesn't even make sense really when you even think about it a little bit.

In simple words Devil Dog is a pretty bad horror movie, but it is a fun one.

- **