Bow Wow Wow! This movie is creepy.
We’re supposed to see “Good Boy” through the perspective of the dog. It’s not a POV movie where the humans would speak gibberish nor does the dog Indy have a voice actor. But we see it from the dog’s angle as his owner might in danger from a sinister force. Imagine if Micah and Katie had a dog in “Paranormal Activity,” and that dog was the star of the movie. Cut out the security camera footage here, and “Good Boy” would be that horror movie.
We see Indy looking and feeling skittish as he leaves for the car during a storm and goes inside his terminally ill owner Todd’s (Shane Jensen) dead grandpa’s house that is in repairs and almost loses power (“The cursed family house is a great way to relax,” as said by the sister”). The house has an old TV with a lot of VHS tapes consisting of home movies and maybe some horror movies. That is if they are really horror movies.
Without barking too much, this dog sees a lot of strange things, like another dog in the house or a hunter looking like a masked killer in camouflage. Or possibly something creepier. We can even tell he’s not sure what to make of all of this, but he’s smart enough to know when to hide under the bed.
It’s funny because this week, I watched “Coyotes,” which had Justin Long and Kate Bosworth dealing with wild species. And both dogs and coyotes are members of the Canidae family. I didn’t care about that movie for its cliches and lack of creativity, but I prefer “Good Boy” for showing us a different view of the paranormal activity genre. And not that I was comparing time lengths or anything, but this is the shorter movie of the two, running for 73 minutes. Even if we’re not 100% sure what the Hell is going on, that’s still plenty of time for us to see the dog deal with the horrors in his own skittish ways.
I must say Indy is a fresh canine actor in the ways that he develops through the horrors and does what his owner-the film’s director Ben Leonberg-commands. And that guy is new to the movie game, and already, he’s proven himself to be a natural with the help of co-writer Alex Cannon, cinematographer Wade Grebnoel, editor Curtis Roberts, and composer Sam Boase-Miller.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m an uncle to two dogs, so I myself was a little skittish about whether or not the “Good Boy” would treat Indy right, and it does. We should see horror movies from different angles, and here, we get to see it from the dog’s view. And it’s kind of refreshing, because there are times when Todd (remember, that’s the dog’s movie owner) tells him to leave him alone, due to his stress and illness, and if this movie were told from the human’s perspective, I would have felt bad for the dog. I do here, a little, but this is obviously the better version than what I’m imagining right now.
I wonder if there should be a dog’s screening of this movie. Then, the theater ushers would either deal with Kibbles n Bits or pee and poop on the floors. Maybe show this movie in the park at night. To the humans, just snacks and drinks on the floor.