WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

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."

kapelusznik18 ***SPOILERS*** Purposely, I would assume, released or broadcast on__ Halloween 1978 the made for TV movie "Devil Dog: The Hound from Hell" has to do with this Devil Cult in Southern California who uses dogs to infiltrate unsuspecting people's homes. That's after their pet dogs are killed and turn the inhabitants into Devil worshiping zombies. Ther movie has to do with the Barry family dog Skippy who was run over just in time, this all happens in less then one hour, for Devil cult member fruit & vegetable man Dunworth, R. G Armstrong, to drive up and offer's the grieving family this cute German Sheppard puppy whom they affectingly name Lucky. It's not long when Lucky shows his teeth or real identity as the "Dog from Hell" who ends up killing any one, human or animal , who stands in his way by exposing him for what he is and what he's up to. It the man of the house Mike Barry, Richard Crenna, who seems to be immune, because he has a heart of gold, to the dog's hypnotic spell that turned his entire family his wife Betty, Yvette Mimieux, and children Bonnie & Charlie, Kim Richards & Ike Eisenmann, into unfeeling and emotionless robots. Despite all the evidence that his family is possessed by the Devil, as the results of his Devil Dog Lucky, Mike still thinks it's his mind that's playing tricks on him instead of what he sees, a family of Devil worshipers, with his own two eyes!***SPOILERS*** Finally realizing the situation that he's facing Mike goes to this expert on the occult ,Martine Beswick, who clues him in on what he's up against: The Devil himself! Told to take a trip to Ecuador in Central America the see the wise old man on the hill, Victor Jory, who can help him put an end to all this horror Mike finds out from the old guy that because he, unlike his family, can't be controlled by the family dog he's got the power to send it back to hell from which it came. But the rub is that he may well lose his soul in doing itWorth waiting for the ending sequence when Lucky the Devil Dog shows his true colors, jet black, and confronts Mike in a battles between Good & Evil. Lucky now in full battle gear looking like the demon in the movie "Curse of the Demon" with horns and foot long canine nine fangs, and about the size of a full grown elephant, the end makes up for all the boring and in many cases confusing scenes that lead up to it. But in the end the end of the Devil Dog ain't really over with the mysterious and evil fruit & vegetable man Dunworth still having a couple of aces or puppies up his sleeve and ready to lay them on the table!

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.

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". :-)