Its that time of year again, time for my favorite themed reviews, the Dog Days of Summer! If you’re a returning reader then you know what to expect, lean back, relax and get ready for a dog cinema extravaganza! If you’re new then let me briefly explain, when I first started writing about bizarre movies I stumbled upon the strange sub-genre of dog based films. Previously I’ve covered movies like, My Magic Dog, Dude Where’s My Dog?, and An Easter Bunny Puppy, and each year I think I’ve found the strangest, most out there dog film. Each year I am wrong. These movies are constantly being produced and somehow they always manage to make one worse than the ones I have already seen.

The Adventure! Or Lack Thereof…

Now that I’ve explained the premise of the series, let’s ease into the Dog Days of Summer with a recent find, A Dog’s Adventure. Not to be confused with A Dog’s Journey, A Dog’s Purpose, or A Dog’s Way Home, A Dog’s Adventure kind of tells us the story of a lovable dalmatian, a poor dog abandoned by his owner outside an animal shelter who is quickly found by the mother-son duo running the animal shelter and together the boy and this dog embark on a…wait, does the dog ever go on an adventure? He just stays at the shelter the whole time? Well, that’s hardly an adventure.

Ya Know What The Kids Love? DISCUSSIONS OF TRUSTS!

If there’s no adventure, then what happens? If you’re familiar at all with dog films then this plot is going to have you groaning. The animal shelter is in tough financial times and it might have to close down! Oh, the humanity! Now veterinarian(?) mom and son won’t be able to keep all these animals! It’s especially sad because the dad is dead too and his trust won’t release funds to cover the animal shelter…wait, why is there a scene about trusts in a movie called A Dog’s Adventure? And for that matter, why did the dad put all his money in a trust? Did he not have faith in his wife to properly manage the funds? There may have been some behind the scenes issues to this marriage…

OH GOD LOOK AT THIS MOVIE

So you know the routine, the spunky heroes have to raise money for the animal shelter so it can be saved, a greedy business owner wants to buy the land so he can develop it, making him an ultimate villain, all very standard. The question remains if this is all so boring then why am I even talking about A Dog’s Adventure? 2 reasons, firstly the production quality is horrendous in the best way, please take a gander at the following screenshots.

Now I admit to the horrible sin of never having seen Shaft.

Secondly, we get to meet all the other animals in the shelter and apart from all the typical ‘animals have accents associated with their names’ joke that every dog movie ever made still thinks is funny, there is another weirder joke. About half of the animals’ voices are just celebrity/iconic character impressions, like there’s a big brown dog everyone just calls Shaft. First off, do you get it? Second off, I have no idea if its a good impression because I’ve never seen Shaft. But hey, all the kids love Shaft so that HAS to be in the movie!

TIME FOR SOME REFERENCES

There are a couple other impressions too that I recognized, one of the dogs is Butthead (of Beavis and Butthead) and the dachshund is Arnold Schwarzenegger and constantly quoting his movies, also this one isn’t a dog but there is a hawk who only speaks in Fat Bastard quotes. It’s a veritable who’s who of 90s pop culture references, like if an ‘Only 90s Kids Remember’ meme somehow morphed into a dog movie.

Eh, some funny stuff happened.

Other than that there are a few things that happen that are weird enough to be funny, the main dog occasionally has flashbacks to his mom giving him advice that very specifically relates to several predicaments he is in, and also once or twice dogs will comment on how attractive the mom is, which, let me just say, is a particularly uncomfortable series of moments that I don’t want to think about at all.

I suppose this movie gets a pass…for now.

Aside from that, there isn’t anything that bad in A Dog’s Adventure. Sure, it’s derivative and poorly produced, but it means well, and just the attempt at being a children’s dog movie without having anything catastrophically wrong with it is enough to get a pass from me. It’s not a scam or a fraud, just a not very good movie, which isn’t enough to make me mad anymore. God my standards have gotten low.