Man's Best Friend backdrop
Man's Best Friend poster

MAN'S BEST FRIEND

1993 US HMDB
November 19, 1993

A genetic research facility worker exposes animal abuses there to a local TV reporter, who frees and takes in a genetically altered dog from the lab, unaware that he has a violent streak.

Directors

John Lafia

Cast

Ally Sheedy, Lance Henriksen, Robert Costanzo, Fredric Lehne, John Cassini, J.D. Daniels, William Sanderson, Trula M. Marcus, Robin Frates, Rick Barker
Horror Commedia Thriller Fantascienza

REVIEWS (1)

MR

Marco Ruggeri

A couple of daring journalists infiltrate the laboratories of E-Max, a company that conducts genetic experiments on animals, in an attempt to produce a report denouncing the torture inflicted on the poor beasts. But not everything goes as planned, and they find themselves fleeing, taking with them a giant dog with a docile appearance, which is actually nothing more than the result of a futuristic genetic experiment. The dog has within it the special abilities of other animals, making it a real super-dog worth a million dollars. The journalists do not know that the beast is mentally unstable, a killing machine ready to explode at any moment. The plot of this film by John Lafia (already director of "Bambola Assassina 2") certainly does not aim for originality, exploiting a series of cinematic and narrative clichés already abused to infinity. Some ideas seem interesting, the dog's multiple abilities seem to promise a good dose of entertainment, even if their concrete manifestation fails to scare at all: watching the dog exploit the chameleon's ability and appear out of nowhere inside a dark room, or climb like a jaguar up a tree to eat a cat makes you smile more than anything else. The film also offers very little from the "splatter" point of view, an aspect that would probably have increased the interest in a film already too lacking in emotional tension. The mediocre acting of the actors (with the exception of the good old Lance Henriksen, who deserves a passing grade only for the name he carries) and the shortcomings in terms of screenwriting ultimately provide a flat, boring, sometimes forced and annoyingly comic film, which adds nothing to what we have already seen in the cinema at least a thousand times. Not bad, but practically useless.

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