Devil Dog: The Hound from Hell (1978)
Article 6061 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-15-2022
Directed by Curtis Harrington
Featuring Richard Crenna, Yvette Mimieux, Kim Richards
Country: USA
What it is: Not a good boy

A suburban family is given a puppy as a gift, but it turns out to be an evil force that possesses the family and kills anyone who threatens it.

What this TV-Movie amounts to is a variation of THE OMEN in which the Antichrist is replaced with a demon dog. And for what it is, it’s passable at best, I suppose, but there are some annoyances; there’s some silly dialogue and the score is truly tedious. It’s biggest problem is the snail’s pace of the story; quite frankly, you could ignore it for several minutes at a time and be confident you haven’t missed anything important. For a while I thought this was going to prove to be one of those TV-movies not intended as a pilot, but check in on the last five minutes and you’ll catch them setting it up. I’m glad they didn’t bite: imagine a version of KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER in which characters less interesting than Kolchak chase the same monster every week.