Cold Dog Soup Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.0

Cold Dog Soup Blu-ray Movie Review

A recipe for disaster.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater January 5, 2011

It would appear that Randy Quaid has gone off the deep end. If you haven’t been following the specifics, check out the terrific feature about the actor in this month’s Vanity Fair, but the basics are this: Quaid and his former model wife Evi are convinced that a shadowy organization called the “Hollywood Star Whackers” are out to assassinate them, and that these “Whackers” are also responsible for the “murders” of Heath Ledger, David Carradine, and other recent high-profile celebrity deaths. A few months ago, Randy and Evi fled to Canada, where—according to the article—they’ve essentially been living out of their Honda Prius while seeking refugee status. The Quaid’s descent into delusion is bizarre, sad, and—unlike Joaquin Phoenix’s sham downward spiral for I’m Still Here—most likely real. That said, if you want to see Randy acting like a total loon, check out Cold Dog Soup, a “surreal black comedy”—so says the blurb on the cover—that was released by HandMade films in 1990. On second thought, don’t. The film really isn’t any good.

Yep, that's a dead dog.

Frank Whaley (Pulp Fiction) plays Michael, a successful—read: materialistic—young New York stock trader who spies a hot chick at the gym, Sarah (Christine Harnos), and decides to try his luck. He slips into a jacuzzi with her and, whaddaya know, five minutes later she invites him to her place for dinner with her mom and dog. Sarah turns out to be a complete spazz—and, for added quirk factor, she wears a gloved prosthetic because her left hand was “eaten” by a copy machine—but Michael is too horny to call it quits, even after the dog, Jasper, eats some olives, goes into a seizure, and dies, right there in the dining room. Sarah’s mom sends Michael on an errand to bury the dearly departed pet in Central Park, but when Michael hops in an unlicensed taxi, he gets taken for a ride—literally and figuratively—by crazy cabbie Jack Cloud (Quaid), who suggests they should sell the dead dog for cash and split the profits. “What sort of person would buy a dead dog?” Michael asks, but the answer is all sorts of people. Over the course of a single night, Jack hauls Michael to a Hassidic tannery, a hot dog stand, a Chinese restaurant—“I can’t serve stiff dog… not fair to customers!”—and an underground voodoo dance party, all in an attempt to pawn poor Jasper off for money.

You’ve heard of a "shaggy dog story"—a tale that meanders its way to a total anti-climax of an ending—well, Cold Dog Soup is a shaggy dog film, about, yes, a dead shaggy dog. How meta. The movie drifts aimlessly through a series of episodic encounters that get increasingly weirder and less plausible. I think we can all accept that a tannery or a restaurant might feasibly consider buying a dead dog—this is not beyond the realm of possibility—but when was the last time a gang of dune buggy riders set up a full-on motocross course, complete with dirt jumps, in some barren New York neighborhood? We’re meant to be taking a darkly comic journey through an exaggerated Manhattan underworld where anything could happen, but after the first few stops on Jack Cloud’s early a.m. itinerary, you’ll want to lie down in the back seat and fall asleep.

Much of the nonsense feels like oddity for the sake of oddity, but to give it some semblance of depth, Cloud speaks in Zen koan-like riddles and deconstructs aphorisms until they become meaningless, like when he asks, “If time is money, and money is the root of all evil, is time the root of all evil? If time heals all wounds, does money wound all heels? If time waits for no one, who does the root of all evil wait for?” There’s no intelligence behind any of this, though. It’s little more than schizophrenic word-salad prattle. Randy Quaid is suitably wild-eyed and out-of-control, but Whaley and Harnos are both mildly irritating—Whaley, in particular, is over-earnest by half—and they’re given little do besides huddle in the back seat of Cloud’s cab and look terrified.

After putting out Blu-ray editions of several much-beloved HandMade titles in 2010—Withnail & I, The Long Good Friday, Time Bandits, Mona Lisa—it seems strange that Image Entertainment would choose Cold Dog Soup as their next HandMade release. Directed by Alan Metter—who went on to helm veritable masterpieces like Police Academy: Mission to Moscow and The Growing Pains Movie —the film is an oddball obscurity, but it’s no cult classic, and it’s never been even particularly well-liked. Maybe the distributor is just trying to capitalize on Randy Quaid’s name being in the news lately, but who knows? Regardless, Cold Dog Soup is a film that wants desperately to be a cult favorite, from its bet you didn’t see that coming premise to its gratuitously kooky characters and would-be philosophical undercurrent. None of it works. It all plays out like a low-rent, exceedingly dull version of some hypothetical mash-up between Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth, two films that take on the same sort of material with much better results.

Cold Dog Soup Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

It's clear that no real restoration work went into Cold Dog Soup's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer—white specks dot the print throughout—but the film looks much better than Image's first batch of HandMade titles, which were riddled with noisiness and other compression/presentation problems. (Time Bandits was even interlaced, for some arcane reason.) The general look here is a little spongy, but completely in keeping with the way the film was shot. Although the finest potential textures are lost in mild softness, there's more than enough detail on display to warrant going with the Blu- ray instead of a DVD. Color is stable, and if not exactly vivid, at least realistic and dense. Since most of the film takes place at night, it's important that black levels are deep but not to the point of crushing shadow detail, and for the most part, they are. Grain spikes occasionally, but it looks natural, untouched by DNR. Likewise, I didn't spot any excess edge enhancement or any other kinds of post-telecine tweaking. It really looks like they just ran the print through the machine, gave the transfer a solid encode, and called it a day. And there's nothing wrong with that. Honestly, who's going to pour money and effort into a complete restorative overhaul of Cold Dog Soup?

Cold Dog Soup Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, however, is a little more problematic. There's a fairly significant disparity between the levels of the dialogue, the sound effects, and the score, which requires frequent fiddling with the volume on your remote to sustain a decent balance. The vocals are much too low in the mix and have a thin, almost tinny quality at times. Conversely, the music is too loud. Otherwise, the track delivers probably exactly what you'd expect—a moderate amount of New York City-at-night ambience and occasional usage of the rear speakers for cross-channel effects, like when the dune buggies are zipping to and fro around us. But, like I said, keep the remote for your receiver handy—you'll be trimming and boosting the volume with nearly every scene change.

Cold Dog Soup Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only bonus feature on the disc is a 35-minute standard definition montage of trailers for just about every title HandMade Films ever released.

Cold Dog Soup Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Cold Dog Soup was a Quirky Indie Comedy before that genre label ever really existed, but the film's oddities go unsupported by weak writing and poor characterization. In the end, the movie is about as much fun as toting around a dead dog in a garbage bag. That is, not very. That said, it's good to see that Image Entertainment is committed to releasing more films from the HandMade catalog. I'm curious to see what else they put out in 2011.