Man's Best Friend (1993)

Max knows all the tricks - sit, down, fetch, roll over, slaughter the mugger...

In Man's Best Friend, TV news reporter Lori Tanner (Ally Sheedy - remember her?) investigates EMAX Research (the E probably stands for Evil), a genetics laboratory that apparently tests how much animal abuse you can perform before a TV news reporter investigates you. She and her camera-woman sneak around the lab late at night, shooting footage of the abused animals and telling themselves how good and hard-hitting their breakthrough story is going to be.

Lori accidentally unleashes (ha!) Max, a giant, super-intelligent Tibetan Mastiff that makes Cujo look like, um... a smaller dog than he actually was. When the brutal Dr. Jarret (the always reliable Lance Henriksen) chases after Max, the dog gets in the car with the cub reporters, who drive away, not knowing what they have gotten themselves into.

Max, a prototype EMAX 3000 guard dog, is genetically enhanced with DNA from other animals, providing him with their most desirable traits - a lion's fierceness, a snake's quickness, even a chameleon's ability to blend in with his surroundings... That sort of thing. He's like the Serpentor of dogs.

This particular EMAX 3000 is on a neuropathic drug that keeps him calm. When it starts to wear off, all sorts of awesome stuff happens. Max destroys an annoying kid's bicycle, climbs a tree, swallows a cat whole (after being sicced on the cat by two cruel, heartless children that we are evidently supposed to like), bites through Lori's boyfriend's brake line, defiles a Collie (to the strains of "Puppy Love"), pees acid on a fire hydrant, mutilates a mailman (as seen in Friday - Craig's dad watches this scene on tv... "It's yo' ass, Mr. Postman!"), buries the bodies under the porch like a stash of bones (which is kinda what it is), devours a parrot in a puff of feathers, acid-pees the boyfriend's face, and bites a cruel junkyard owner in the... um... junk.

Man's Best Friend is a great example of an awesomely bad movie. There's violence, blood, talking computers, character actors that you've seen before... somewhere. It's really an almost perfect example of fluffy, bad, early-90s horror, from a time before Hollywood started cashing in on the 90s angst with movies like Seven. Put this one in the same category as Dr. Giggles and The Lawnmower Man.

The biggest knock against it as a good bad movie is the abundant violence against animals. I love me some dogs and cats, and I hate the thought of animal violence in real life. But everything in this movie is so ridiculous that it's more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon than something PETA should be protesting (though I imagine they did anyway). In fact, as the violence goes, there is some evidence that this is really a stealth parody. Still, some folks will want to avoid Man's Best Friend for this reason.