ridiculous rating

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Just before my local Hollywood Video closed down (RIP) I went in and and picked up a number of Videos on sale,which appeared to largely be films that have not come out on disc. Despite being taken by clips of his movies in the doc Not Quite Hollywood I for some reason have never got round to seeing a flick from Brian Trenchard- Smith.Sorting out Videos to view for the IMDb Horror boards October Challenge,I found an unwatched Hollywood tape of a Trenchard- Smith's family offering,which led to me letting the atomic dog roam free.The plot:Finding leaks,a nuclear plant is ordered to shut down right away.Refusing to go with his owner,a dog stays as everyone leaves the plant. Over the next year,the dog licks up the nuclear wastes and mutates. Crossing paths with a female dog who has wandered on the plant,the now-mutant dog breeds with it. Returning home,the Yates family find that their loyal dog has returned with puppies. As they meet the puppies,their dog dies.Keeping the puppies,the Yates start to see the dogs act very strangely.View on the film:Working with the "family TV Movie" dog tags,director Brian Trenchard-Smith and cinematographer David Lewis surprisingly show some real white fangs with Ozploitation-style first person tracking shots from the mutant dogs point of view,and the good old boy being having a liking to rip any persons throat out,who tries to keep him apart from the family. Whilst having to shoulder some aw-shucks TV family moments (with Isabella Hofmann and Katie Stuart being welcomed inclusions)the screenplay by Miguel Tejada-Flores grabs the collar for some rather unsettling bites at Horror,which includes killing almost every dog in the film, (sweet dreams kids!) and giving the lead mutant dog a sharp mind which allows for tense traps to be made for the stupid humans,as Cujo Jr wags his tail.

Okay first things first & that is this is a movie not an Animal Planet documentary so it will do as all movies should & that is suspend belief but this does not ask you to suspend it to stupidity levels like any of the Shark Attack munch munch naked women about to get made into shark food do. The movie does slightly mislead you from the poster as you are expecting some sort of super power dog when this starts with a man (cleaner I think) & his puppy who are at the Nuclear power plant when it suffers a LOW LEVEL I will repeat this a LOW LEVEL leak & the plant is immediately shut down & all staff removed including the cleaner who is refused allowance to go get his pup (admittedly you would have thought he would have sneaked back in & got him but nope he does not). Move on a year & you have a family new to the area comprising of dad (an inventor of gadgets,mum (a writer of children s books),teenage son (& no just a normal teen not a troubled one) & lastly but not lastly a daughter (this bit really says a lot about the people who wrote the description as they say about the son being the main character where as to me it is the daughter) & the family Labrador bitch. The son is going out with some of the towns boys for the evening & the dog goes with them & they end up at the abandoned power plant where one of the son's new friends decides to take out his .22 rifle & shoot at the exterior lighting where upon they see the pup (but he is now a full grown dog) & being a fool shoots at the dog so the dog runs off & this friend decides to trespass onto the site. The film is not a horror & does not have anything that would make me think unsuitable for older children (10 plus)so I would say give it a try.

[Mild spoilers included] This won't win any Animal Planet awards, nor is it exactly good sci-fi. It's basically a 1950's B-movie updated to the 90's. A puppy dog is left behind when a nuclear power plant suffers a "low-level radiation leak," and, instead of dying horribly, is transformed into a Superdog with human intelligence and the ability to leap 9-ft. fences at a single bound. He impregnates the dog of a family who's just moved into town (who apparently don't care their house is down the block from an evacuated nuclear plant) then terrorizes them trying to reclaim his puppies, one of whom is tame and the other vicious. When that doesn't work he tries to "adopt" the family's little girl, who doesn't fear him. Fairly pedestrian all the way around, with not much tension (though the atomic dog is well trained). And I'm particularly bewildered by the poster who said this is a good children's movie; there are 4 dogs in this movie and three of them end up dead.

The dogs were not presented as being vicious naturally but by genetic malfunction. The villains in my estimation were the humans who ran the defective Atomic Power Plant and then abandoned it. They took no safety precautions causing a hazard to anyone who came in contact with the Plant. In this case, the innocent dogs were the victims of radiation poisoning. In my opinion, besides family entertainment, this movie also makes a social commentary.