Film is Pwn

You know, I’d like to watch “clean” movies more, I really would.  I am, after all, a clean guy – I don’t cuss, I don’t drink, I never did drugs, I don’t sleep around, I shower nearly every day (often with soap), and I have never give someone a roundhouse kick if I happen to disagree with them.  And yet those very qualities (promiscuous, profanity, substance abuse, unnecessary spin-kickery) permeate the movies I opt to write about here, with occasional interludes like my blog on The Country Bears, for example.

You wanna know why? I’ll tell you why: Outside Pixar, most “G” rated stuff is crap like Space Buddies.

Now, there’s nothing “wrong” with a film like Space Buddies, where the target audience thinks that talking, wise-cracking dogs getting into various misadventures is inherently entertaining.  In fairness, the target audience is not yet potty trained and can generally be amused by a hearty game of “peek-a-boo” for the full running time of Space Buddies.  If not for the fact that prolonged “peek-a-booing” can tire out parents and their wrists, I assume there would never be a need to purloin a copy of Space Buddies and pop it in the DVD player in order to entertain the little ones.

Yet why did I — a childless, attractive, and available bachelor — even lower myself to watch Space Buddies?  Well, my cohorts and I were interested in possibly doing an iRiff on the topic, and someone brought up Space Buddies as a candidate.  We aren’t riffing on this four-legged atrocity, so I might as well get a blog out of it, right?

The five spacebound Buddies are five cute, “talking” Golden Retrievers, apparently the spawn of Air Bud, the basketball playing dog who had his own movies a couple of years ago (Mr. Bud does not appear, presumably due to a contract dispute with Disney over a producer credit). The Buddies represent a broad spectrum of stereotypes or, if you’d like to be kind, archetypes.  There’s the diva dog, Rosebud; the dirty (in the literal sense) dog, Mudbud; there’s the tubby, perpetually hungry Buddy, Budderball; there’s the enlightened dog, Buddha; and the hip-hop pup, B-Dawg.

Each of the Buddies has a different child owner who fits neatly in with their respective gimmick, which is really fortunate.  How awkward would it have been if the breakdancin’ B-Dawg ended up with the prissy girl who was all about tea parties and playing dress-up?

The plot of the film is so simple an amoeba can follow it, and I can only assume a single celled lifeform concocted it (I suspect Ryan Seacrest).

The child owners of the Buddies are going on a field trip to the facilities of a private company planning to send a ship to the moon.  I thought such a NASA-caliber endeavor would require thousands of highly skilled technicians and a trillion dollar facility, but that’s not the case.  Instead, we get three dedicated employees, one evil, scheming bureaucrat, and said bureaucrat’s effeminate Asian assistant. Heck, if that’s all it takes, Film Is Pwn could launch a manned moon mission (I call scheming bureaucrat!).

The Buddies stowaway on the kids’ school bus, then sneak into that barely guarded space facility, get fitted with custom Doggy spacesuits with a convenient, auto-spacesuit generator, sneak onboard the ship, and accidentally launch it to the moon.

I’d point out the plot holes, logical flaws, out flat out ridiculous aspects, but the point is the dogs are cute and kids will like that.  I do fell compelled to point out that those doggy spacesuits our heroes don and wear for the duration of the lengthy adventure sure must have filled with Buddy Poo at some point . . .

The closest thing to legitimate entertainment comes when the Buddies dock with a long lost, derelict Russian space station inhabited by crazy cosmonaut Diedrich Bader (of the Drew Carey Show/Office Space fame), and Bader, looking like Tom Hanks in Castaway after ten cases of Red Bull, actually injects some bonafide levity into the film (not much, but some — or, it’s possible I was just happy to know Bader got work after the aforementioned Country Bears film).

On the station, the Buddies meet Russian cosmodog Spudnick (the name being the most clever thing in the movie, a cross between the late great, beer pitchdog Spuds McKenzie, who Spudnick resembles, and Sputnik, the first ever satellite to orbit Earth).  Spudnick longs to be reunited with his “boy Sasha,” and he wonders if Sasha remembers him; at this point we cut to a brief scene of Sasha attending to a marble statue in Spudnick’s image — and I shouted at the screen, “Remember you?  He worships you!”  If anyone had been watching this movie with me, I’d like to believe they would have laughed.

Anyhoo, Spudnick hitches along for the rest of the madcap adventure, which (spoiler warning!) features the Buddies going walkies on the moon.  If — or, I should say, WHEN — you acquire your copy of Space Buddies, pay special attention to the walking on the moon scene, and see if you can spot the prolonged moments when you can see the studio reflected on the puppies’ visors.  Awesome!

To get a review of the film from its most lenient critic, I gave the DVD of Space Buddies to my friend Brian, which he watched with his two year old daughter.  When I asked what her reaction, I was told she was entertained, though she got restless when the dogs weren’t on screen.  Therefore, I feel relatively safe in declaring that you are better off taking your child to a petstore rather than purchasing them Space Buddies.

–Daniel J. Roos truly wishes he could like cutesy, inoffensive, G-rated movies like this. The world would surely be a better, happier place if he could.