Ally and Obie

Directed by Alfred Robbins

Welcome back to this week’s entry into the Dog Days of Summer, my favorite time of year where I get to write about the best bad family dog movies I can find! After the rousing success that was last week’s film Quigley, I had to think long and hard about what could possibly follow that insanity. Instead of trying to top the weirdness of Quigley, I decided that we needed to get back to the bread and butter of the Dog Days of Summer, talking dog movies! After seeing that magical poster up there and reading about how in this film, Ally gets by with some help from her talking dog Obie, I thought we had a real winner. In a way I think we do, because Ally and Obie is one of the most bafflingly written “dog” movies I’ve encountered, starting with scene one.

Our story starts off with Ally moping about in a room filled with, still packed, moving boxes. Her mother comes in and quickly chides Ally for not having unpacked her things while barrelling through her expository dialogue explaining that Ally’s mom divorced her previous husband, instantly remarried, and also they all moved, leaving Ally’s friends in her old neighborhood behind. There’s never a sense of what order these events happened in, so I’ll just assume last week was very busy for this family. Ally is also introduced to her new Grandfather, who is unironically wholesome and a bright spot of the film, and Obie, an aging Australian shepherd.

Please Don’t Look At My Sweat Stains, Ally.

While Ally is complaining about not having any friends in this new town, Grandpa kindly suggests that she come with him and Obie on a walk throughout the neighborhood so they can get acquainted with the new area. After reassuring Ally that she’ll find some friends in the neighborhood soon, he explains to Ally that Obie is a “special dog” and she’ll figure out why once they get to know each other better. Grandpa’s foreshadowing is a little undercut by two things, the first being that this neighborhood is really loud and staticy so the dialogue is difficult to hear, and the second being that Grandpa has super noticeable tit sweat stains.

Also Please Pay No Mind To This Dog That Is About To Shit.

I’m not trying to make fun of Grandpa or body shame or any of that, lord knows I’ve been there too, but couldn’t the director or camera guy or wardrobe have said, oh wait we need to get GRandpa another shirt or some baby powder because those stains are dead center in the frame. That isn’t the most distracting thing about this sequence though because as they’re walking away, Obie gets in a bow-legged stance and is about to take a huge dump which the editor mercifully removed.

This Movie Almost Surprised Me. I Shouldn’t Have Gotten My Hopes Up.

After getting out of the house to meet new people, Ally instantly runs into a group of girls who seem friendly and receptive to hanging out, score! I was really surprised when this happened, I’m so used to the standard scene where everyone makes fun of and scorns the new kid for being new and I was relieved this movie didn’t do that. Until it does. The girls play a mean prank on Ally by playing a game of ‘Bicycle hide and seek’ (don’t even ask me how that would work) with her and leaving her stranded in a dead-end street when she gets lost. This is disappointing, but it does lead to some fun stuff, like Obie appearing out of nowhere to guide her back home (I thought he was an inside dog but okay) and Ally appearing in an avant-garde horror shot.

Time For Some Math!

Cut immediately to Ally entering her new school, where we are introduced to what Ally and Obie is actually about; Ally’s herculean struggles with middle school math. That wasn’t a joke, the entire main plot is about how Ally has to do well in math or her family can’t go on a vacation to Disneyland, and every other scene is back in that math class so Ally can take a test or so three students in a row can go to the blackboard and solve a math problem. It says something awful when you’re trying to find ways to pad a movie that is, with credits and outtakes and an added trailer, seventy-two minutes. This does lead to the scene where Obie finally talks to Ally, not to comfort her or plan vengeance on the bullies, but to teach her algebra!

The Viper Tongued Middle Schoolers.

Once Ally learns algebra from her talking dog, she goes out to confront the neighborhood bullies, telling them how what they did was not very nice and that she has a much cooler talking dog to hang out with now. That isn’t a joke. She tells this group of middle schoolers she has a talking dog and surprisingly none of these kids take the obvious route and call her crazy. They do call her Christopher Columbus. I think it’s an ironic thing because she got lost? It’s a little bizarre, and I love how kids’ movies always forget that middle schoolers regularly say some of the vilest things you will ever hear.

Wow, Making Friends Is Easy!

Did you find this bullying subplot interesting? Neither did the filmmakers, because in the very next scene two of the bullies, who are sisters, show up at Ally’s house with their grandma to speak with Ally’s mother. The bullies’ grandma explains to Ally’s mother that she heard her granddaughters were bullies and that they needed to apologize and make amends for their behavior by doing all Ally’s chores for a week. I thought this was going to be the plot, like, Ally spends the rest of the movie bonding with these girls since they’re at her house so much and they realize she’s cool and genuinely become friends. NOPE. They do Ally’s chores while she sits around drinking lemonade and then are instantly best friends with her. This kicks off my favorite lesson I have ever seen in a kids’ movie, which is if you don’t do anything eventually everything will work out for the best.

Wait, Where’s Obie?

Some of you may be noticing something, and that is that I have barely mentioned Obie, the dog who appears in the title of this film! That is because apart from the teaching Ally math bit and one unimportant scene where he gives Ally advice on her to deal with her mean brother Alex, Obie does nothing in this movie. After teaching Ally algebra, Obie can’t teach her the other math sections so she has to get a human tutor, so we don’t even get any more scenes of Tutor Obie, he’s just a dog that Ally sometimes hangs out with. He doesn’t help with the lemonade stand that Ally sets up, which is another wonderful dose of padding in this barely an hour-long film, but he does go with Ally and her friends to buy cupcakes with the whopping $8.32 Ally earned from the lemonade stand. I’m sorry, but you aren’t getting 4 cupcakes from a cupcake shop with less than nine dollars in 2014.

There He Goes!

To the cupcake shop they all go, a place of sweet confectioneries and vile villains, for that, is where the plot of the second half of the movie kicks off. After tying Obie to a lamppost while they go in to grab at most two cupcakes to share, two boys instantly leap from the shadows and pounce on the unsuspecting dog, untying his leash and dognapping him for their own nefarious purposes! Why were they waiting around that exact corner at this exact time as if they knew Ally’s schedule? Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad something is happening. What is messed up though is that outside the cupcake shop two people at a table right next to the lamppost clearly saw Ally tie Obie up, and they don’t lift a finger to stop these suspicious boys who are taking a dog that is definitely not theirs.

Standard NYPD Electrical Tape.

After Ally and friends emerge from the store, they realize that Obie is missing and, with no help from the many witnesses who saw the whole thing, begin looking for him. This leads to one of the best scenes in the film, the scene where they report this to the police. After calling in and reporting their dog missing, the police decide to send an officer over, for some reason, to ask questions they could have easily asked over the phone during the filing of the police report. The officer comes over and asks them standard questions, but it’s not what he says that’s interesting, its how he looks. This officer is wearing an NYPD shirt, even though we clearly see Georgia license plates earlier in the film, and a badge that has black electrical tape over the badge number, which is plainly visible whenever he is in the frame.

The Power Of Prayer. Also, The Power Of Effort.

Why even include this scene? There’s no reason for the cop to show up to their house, and, if you don’t have a good costume, it would save money to have it just be a phone call! Maybe they wanted something to happen in the film because Ally makes no further attempts to save Obie beyond putting up some posters that don’t even have his picture. They don’t look in the neighborhood, they don’t check local animal shelters, everyone except Ally seems to instantly move on with their lives and accept Obie is dead in a ditch somewhere. The only person who even attempts to help is Grandpa, and he tells Ally to pray, to which Ally says she ‘doesn’t know how’. At first, I was really confused because why wouldn’t Grandpa have taught her this earlier, but then I remembered he’s supposed to be her step-Grandpa. So fine. Ally prays. Then Obie escapes his dognappers the next day due to his own actions.

Everything’s Coming Up Ally!

Continuing the theme of everything working itself out with no effort, Obie arrives back home and everyone is happy again! Perfect timing too, as Ally wasn’t even able to do math while she was so worried about her best friend Obie, and math is the real reason why we’re here. That night before her big math test, which will determine whether or not she can go to Disneyland, Ally prays again, thanking God for returning Obie to her and saying since you’re here, could you help me with the math test tomorrow? I’ll say this, this movie would be ten times funnier if it leaned more heavily into the Christian themes and God guides her pencil on the day of the math test. It’s kind of a redundant prayer because at this point we know Ally has learned math and is ready for the test.

Oh, Everything Is Resolved? Great, I Can Head Out.

This is pretty much the end of the movie, Ally does well on her test and then has a birthday party where all the neighborhood girls show up. Some dumb stuff happens there but this review is already way too long so let’s wrap this up by talking about the fallout of the dognapping plotline. While taking a walk with Obie, the two thief boys show up and demand that Ally return ‘their’ dog to them, to which Ally of course says no. They’re about to beat her up and steal this dog when Alex shows up to save the day, chasing off the bullies and being nice to Ally, because we needed to have a third instance of everything working out for the best even though no effort was made. So everyone is friends, everything worked out, and everyone is going to Disneyland. Except for Grandpa. He gets left behind.

I Had Fun With This But I Don’t Know Who Else Will.

On that sour note, our story ends. Ally and Obie is a weird movie. Usually, I can kind of tell why movies were made, even with stuff like Quigley, if there’s a certain moral or message or just a fun story that people thought was worth telling. I can’t make a guess here because the moral is so weird, there isn’t even religious stuff to say that was the point, and the story felt like it was being made up as it went along. I enjoyed watching this, mainly for the weird plotlines and frequent technical incompetence, but I am so curious as to how actual children would react to this movie, because I don’t think it would keep their attention, but I could be wrong. I could only recommend this movie if you have an interest in terrible dog movies like me, this isn’t weird enough to be a general funnybad movie, and most people would be bored by it more than anything else. There’s some weird stuff around the movie, like an alternate poster with a different dog and girl, but it’s not enough to make this interesting.

Thank you for joining me today, thanks for reading, I’ll be back soon with more reviews of all kinds! As always, if you have any recommendations please leave them in a comment below or on my Facebook or Twitter account.

As per usual, I own none of the images used above nor do I claim any ownership of them. They are used under Fair Use doctrine.

Tags: dog days of summer