I’m six years old, running through the isles of the video rental store when the Halloween section catches my eye. There, magnificently, sits a movie with the most adorable golden retriever puppy on the cover. Behind it is a glowing blue halo of false purity. Excitedly, I run to my mother as I eagerly request her approval to check out the movie. Once we get home, my excitement and childhood innocence transforms to horror as the cutesy puppy movie turns out to be a horror movie to my six-year-old self.
Ten years later, I decided to watch this movie again, although tragically under its new name, A Halloween Puppy. This movie is absolutely awful. It ruined my life when I was six, and it ruined my life at 16 because of how bad it is. It is one hour and twenty minutes of pure torture.
The only good graphics are in the intro. Rewatching it now that I am older made me understand why I was scared of this movie as a kid—because the graphics would be horrifying for any child and even some adults. The intro is a detailed drawing of monsters such as mummies and zombies, as well as a scarecrow with a bloody heart. After the monster kind of just stands there a stock image of a puppy randomly appears. It is the weirdest intro to a movie I have ever seen.
After this, the movie looks absolutely horrible when it comes to CGI or editing. Every time they transitioned a scene they would use monster clip art, making the movie look tacky. The graphics all together look like a high school project that the students were forced to make rather than a real movie.
The acting is atrocious. Middle schoolers with no acting experience could do better; the dialogue sounds AI generated, the camera is horrible and shaky the whole time, and they do super big close-ups for no reason. Also, the song they play in the intro is played in the background of the whole movie on a loop. It got to the point where I restarted my Chromebook to check if it was a bug.
All these factors together made me despise watching the movie. I had to watch it in 20-minute spurts just because it was so tedious to watch. I was hoping at least the plot would be okay, but to no one’s surprise, it sucked!
The main character, Adam, is obsessed with Halloween, but I’m pretty sure he’s actually just insane because when asked why he likes Halloween so much, he says, “I like eating piles of candy pretending it’s human flesh.” This is the guy you are supposed to root for as if he isn’t crazy.
The beginning part of the movie is about how his mom, Rachel, wants to go to a cabin during Halloween so she can fix her problems with her boyfriend, Ted. But for some reason, she also wants to bring her son Adam and his friend Molly, even though Halloween is Adam’s favorite holiday and he spent the whole beginning of the movie being excited about it. When Adam asks if they could just go the day after, Rachel says, “Be a man.” Throughout the whole movie, she puts her problems on Adam and Molly. All these things make her really unlikable, even though she’s supposed to be this “amazing and loving mom” character.
Also, Ted is supposed to be this bad boyfriend, but the reason he’s bad is because he doesn’t like PDA, loves pizza and Chinese food, likes to have movie dates and brings Adam’s family a whole box of donuts once a week. I don’t know what Rachel’s problem is because he sounds like the perfect man other than the fact he doesn’t like to talk about the future. But she thinks he’s boring and wants him to go to the cabin with her in the woods so they can communicate about where their relationship is heading.
Molly is Adam’s love interest, and she is the classic girl-next-door stereotype. Being that Adam won’t stop complaining about having to miss his favorite holiday, she tries to do a spell from this spell book she got which would, in her words, “Make you feel a sense of well-being as an object of your stress will transform into a raging, flesh-ripping beast from the lower depth of Mordor.” Adam just hears this and lets her do this for some reason. But the spell doesn’t work, because Ted catches them and says, “Neat-o.” In this scene, we see the worst special effects in the whole movie. A glowing ball floats through the air to Ted’s head and makes him tired. Instead of freaking out, Adam and Molly just laugh. The whole scene is awful and awkward because of how bad the acting is and the ugly special effects.
The spell winds up turning Ted into a bulldog. Rachel and Adam find dog-Ted and, unaware it is Ted, they name the dog Watson and bring him on the trip, assuming human Ted will meet them there. This leads to an awful scene of the mom walking dog-Ted barefoot where there’s a really long close-up on her feet.
I don’t want to spoil this movie too much because I do want you to watch it. The movie is so awful that I think everyone should “hate watch” it at least once. It is the perfect bad movie because of the acting, camara work and special effects. If you ever have a movie night, it is worth the watch, though you may die from the cringey acting. The Magic Puppy ruined my life as a child and it ruined my life once again as a teenager–but this time from utter boredom. It can ruin your life too! The movie is free on YouTube under the channel V Movies. This is quite literally the only way to watch the movie without buying the CD. I’m not the only one who absolutely hates this movie. It is seen on Common Sense where the movie got a 1 out of 5 and a 25 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
