Michael Ledo This is an interesting made for TV movie. A group of Satanists use a dog to produce a litter of evil puppies with limited super natural powers and the power to control people. Richard Crenna's family adopts one of these puppies and the now he becomes the only man to stand between us and Satan's world domination.The movie was more of a psychological thriller/horror. There were some plot continuity problems. The maid accidentally sets fire to herself, then suddenly the movie jumps to one year later. The neighbor drowns in his pool and nothing was said until much later in the movie. Yvette Mimieux plays the sexy wife, who once possessed transforms from a prude to a hottie. She smokes cigarettes, loses buttons on her blouse and wants to go skinny dipping. And she will do anything to see he son advance in school. BUT MILES IS MY FRIEND!There were few special effects, and those were substandard even by 1978 norms. The movie also confuses Christianity with Egyptian symbols. For some reason the Egyptian pyramid with the all seeing eye has more power over the demon than a cross. The movie also stars Kim Richards (age 14) from "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hill."

Paul Andrews Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell starts as happily married couple Mike (Richard Crenna) & Betty Barry (Yvette Mimieux) arrive home & find Skipper their Dog lying dead on the road outside their house, it's their ten year old daughter Bonnie's (Kim Richards) birthday & she is devastated by the news but as luck would have it an old man with a cute litter of puppies just happens to be driving by. Instantly taken by the cute puppies Bonnie & her brother Charlie (Ike Eisenmann) decide to have one & replace Skipper, mum & dad agree & the new puppy is named Lucky. However their is something wrong with Lucky, something evil & the housekeeper knew it but she dies in a mysterious accident, then the Barry's neighbour turns up dead as does one of Charlie's teachers. Mike sees his family change from a loving wife & caring children to cold Satan worshippers. Action is needed & Mike is convinced that Lucky is the spawn of Satan & that he must somehow defeat it...This American & Canadian co-production was directed by veteran Curtis Harrington & was made for television & it originally aired on Halloween the 31st October 1978 & subsequently was picked up for release on video around the world. Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell is as silly as it sounds, a Dog possessed by an evil demon who doesn't actually do that much expect wreck a family. The script takes itself far too seriously & ends up being very dry & quite dull, something as obviously as absurd as Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell should have been written with a sense of humour & an awareness of it's own stupidity which might have made it a bit more fun to watch but as it is Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell is a pretty boring & underwhelming viewing experience. From the very wooden character's to the restrained exploitation elements to the general lack of purposeful story Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell is a bit of a chore to sit through. No explanation is given as to why the Barry family are chosen by the Satan cultists anyway, there's no great reasoning behind the Devil Dog or what it is trying to do, sure it changes the personality of three people & kills three other's but for what purpose exactly? The script's central message is about how evil can corrupt & destroy family values, as seen in the breakdown of the Barry family & that there is nothing more important than the family but even this moral preaching comes across as laboured & ineffective. To try & make the Dog threatening there are a few unintentionally funny scenes like when it tries to hypnotise Mike into putting his own hand into lawnmower blades or when Mike catches his family holding a Satan worshipping ceremony at 3 in the morning but seems quite relaxed about it all the same! At over an hour & a half it drags too with a not worth the wait climax that amounts to nothing more than Mike putting his hand up to the Devil Dog to banish it back to hell.There were quite a few made for television horror films during the 70's like Gargoyles (1972), The Night Stalker (1972), Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973), Killdozer (1974), Killer Bees (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975) & the Stephen King adaptation Salem's Lot (1979) but surely Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell has to be the weakest one out there. As expected there's no violence or gore & when the Devil Gog does show up in it's true form it's a rather silly & sad looking monster. The effects work is pretty poor too with some terrible blue screen work. The US DVD release of Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell comes with an audio interview with it's director Harrinton who makes no attempt to hide his hatred & contempt for this saying he was just a director for hire & he considers it his worst film. There you go, who am I to argue?Probably shot on a low budget on a tight schedule Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell is typical bland made for television fare, competent I suppose but forgettable. This was the third time Kim Rchards & Ike Eisenmann had played brother & sister in a film. The acting is fine I suppose but the seriousness of the production makes the whole thing very dry & dull to watch.Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell is a bad film, a bad film featuring a demon possessed Dog that doesn't really do a lot & isn't scary or threatening at all. Not worth wasting your time on to be honest.

Coventry The concept of this made-for-TV horror movie is ludicrous beyond words, but hey, it was the late 1970's and literally all stupid horror formats were pretty damn profitable, so why not exploit the idea of a satanically possessed dog? The plot of "Devil Dog" is easy to describe to fans of the horror genre: simply think of "The Omen" and replace the newborn baby boy with a nest of German Shepard pups! Seriously, I'm not kidding, that's what the movie is about! During the opening sequence, members of some kind of satanic cult buy a female dog in heat only to have it impregnated by Satan himself. You'd think that the Lord of Darkness has other things on His mind than to fornicate with a German Shepard and take over the world one evil puppy at the time, but apparently not. Exactly like little Damien in "The Omen", one of the puppies is taken in by model family and grows up to become a beautiful and charismatic animal. But Lucky – that's the dog's name – is pure evil and liquidates annoying neighbors and nosy school teachers in derivative and tamely executed ways. He also inflicts his malignant character on the family wife and children, but he cannot force the father (Richard Crenna) to stick his arm into a lawnmower because he's a "chosen one". The whole thing becomes too moronic for words when Crenna eventually travels to Ecuador to search for an ancient wall painting and gets advice from an old witchdoctor who speaks perfect English. I guess he learned that living in isolation atop of a mountain his entire life. Director Curtis Harrington ("What's the matter with Helen", "Ruby") and lead actor Richard Crenna ("Wait until Dark", "The Evil") desperately try to create a suspenseful and mysterious atmosphere, but all is in vain. Scenes like cute puppy eyes spontaneously setting fire to a Spanish maid or a dog dodging bullets without even moving evoke chuckles instead of frights, and not even spooky musical tunes can chance that. The "special" effects are pathetic, especially near the end when the Satan-dog mutates into an utterly cheesy shadow on the wall. "Devil Dog" is a truly dumb movie, but it's definitely hilarious to watch late at night with some friends and loads of liquor. There are entertaining brief cameos of Martine Beswick ("Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde") as the terrifying cult queen and R.G. Armstrong ("The Car", "The Pack") as the evil fruit, vegetable and puppy salesman. And, yes, that annoying daughter is the same kid who gets blown away complaining about her ice-cream in Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13".

Dan Harkless 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". :-)