Beethoven

A couple of weeks ago my cousin mentioned that Beethoven had a dark ending with the bad guy getting stuck full of syringes.  I don’t know how or why this came up but further examination was definitely required.  Turns out it’s not so much dark as it is weird.  And I mean the whole movie.

This piece is gonna be a little haphazard going from point to point so I decided to go with bullets instead of the usual paragraph form.

- This first item may or may not be an issue.  Charles Grodin and his family get Beethoven when he’s a puppy and the dog seems to grow up overnight.  I initially thought this process would’ve taken a bunch of years and therefore the kids should’ve grown too but they clearly do not.  However, according to the internet St. Bernards can take 1-3 years to become fully grown.  So it’s possible that only a year has passed since the family got the dog which means I can buy that the kids look the same age.

- I thought it was kinda funny that two of the kids at first wanted to call Beethoven MC Hammer and The Ultimate Warrior.

 

- Beethoven eats a lot of sweets.  In the course of one day he eats ice cream, a chocolate chip cookie, a Twinkie and a pastry from the bakery.  I don’t have a dog but I’m pretty sure they shouldn’t eat that shit, especially all in one day.

- There’s a scene where the youngest daughter is drowning in a pool and there’s no one around to save her.  Beethoven isn’t around either but somehow he knows that she’s drowning.  This thing breaks out of its enclosure, runs at least several houses (if not several blocks) down, jumps in the pool and rescues the little girl.  Not only can Beethoven understand humans (as can all dogs in this picture) but he’s also clairvoyant.

- David Duchovny and Patricia Heaton are good in this and I wish there was more of them.  They’re so ruthlessly scummy and greedy when they try to close “the big deal”, I love it.  This was before each of them hit it big too with The X Files and Everybody Loves Raymond respectfully.  Duchovny was damn fine at playing snobby dicks in this and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.

- Speaking of “the big deal” angle, with what Beethoven did to Duchovny and Heaton that still shouldn’t have affected the deal.  Their whole plan was to swindle Grodin out of his own company.  This isn’t a delicate situation where Grodin needs to sweet talk these two into providing financing like it usually is.  This time “the big deal” is really “the big scam”.  It’s just assumed that Duchovny and Heaton aren’t interested anymore after the dog roughs them up a bit but there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be.  Maybe Grodin took a tip from his wife and decided to nix the idea.

- There are a couple of times when we see these little table and chairs set up in the kitchen.  You can see them best in the scene where Beethoven sneaks out of his pen at night, grabs something to eat and then sits on the couch to watch TV (!?).  The table and chairs aren’t human sized.  They’re noticeably smaller, maybe only about two to three feet high.  I don’t understand why they’re in the movie.

- Now let’s talk about Grodin’s character for a couple of bullets (to avoid confusion I’m just gonna call him Grodin).  In real life he’s 26 years older than Bonnie Hunt who plays his wife.  I’ll tell you what though, I had no idea.  The age difference surprisingly doesn’t come across in the film.

- They throw in the classic unfunny bit where Beethoven gets in Grodin’s bed and Grodin thinks the dog is his wife at first.  Beethoven licks him and he gets turned on because you know, it’s dark and Grodin’s facing away from the dog so he’s into it.  When Grodin finds out who it really is though he lets out a full throated yell.  Like, I know that was kinda awkward but the situation doesn’t warrant screaming as loud as you can.  You’ll get over it buddy.

 

- If you notice in the Grodin-mistaking-the-dog-for-his-wife scene and the one following it he wears the full pajama outfit with matching pants and shirt.  Let me ask you guys something, do you know anyone who actually wears this fuckin’ thing?  You see this in movies and TV shows all the time but I don’t think it’s something that people bother with in real life.  It seems like a pain in the ass to have a matching outfit on every night when you go to sleep.  No one’s gonna see it except your family so why go through the trouble?  It’s like the filmmakers think that the audience won’t know Grodin’s going to sleep or was sleeping so they have to put him in this very cartoony costume to get the point across.

- Grodin is sort of a greedy bastard in this.  He has a nice two story house in the California suburbs with a wife, three kids and a dog but it’s not enough.  He wants his company to be bigger and he wants more money.

- In Grodin’s defense Beethoven really kinda does destroy the house.  He scratches the door, knocks over plants, gets dirt and mud everywhere, slobers and slimes (yea slimes, Grodin even says “he slimed me!”), dirties the carpet (don’t know if he took a shit on there or if it’s mud) and leaves hair on the furniture.  Not only that but he also destroys Grodin’s shoes, suits, bed sheets and dinner plates.  The dog can be loving at times but he can also be a real asshole.

- You know what, I’ll go one step further with the defense of Grodin’s character here.  He may be cantankerous and a whiner ‘n’ all but it’s a little hard to blame the guy for acting that way.  His wife sprays water on him as he’s leaving for work, Beethoven eats his breakfast, ruins his suits and his bedroom, a creepy veterinarian guy wants his dog so he can experiment on him, the couple he hopes to do business with are douchebags that want to steal the company from him, his kids love the dog more than their own father, even the paperboy throws the newspaper in such a way that causes all the pages to separate and scatter across the front lawn.  I mean shit just does not roll this man’s way, like almost ever.

- One more thing you could pile on to that list is Grodin’s father put his dog down when Grodin was a kid. This doesn’t make sense with his views though.  I would think Grodin would be trying to rescue dogs all the time instead of being disgusted by them.

- Moving on, it’s kinda weird how the other dogs lose respect for Grodin when he takes Beethoven to the vet to be put down.  How do they know that Beethoven is a good dog after all?  They don’t have the full story.  For all they know Beethoven could really be dangerous.  These other dogs just assume that Beethoven doesn’t deserve to be put down simply because he’s a fellow dog.  It’s not right.

- Some of the characters call Beethoven “her” a couple of times but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a male.  The sequel has Beethoven hooking up with a female St. Bernard (I know because she has a pink bow on her head) and they have puppies together.  Plus his name is taken from a male composer reinforcing that they want you to think of the dog as a dude.

- The ending is a little out there.  Grodin jumps through a skylight and beats up the henchmen while his son crashes a car into the bad guy’s lair causing thirteen syringes to fly through the air and embed themselves into the villain’s chest and abdomen.  You see them go in too.  This is not an after the fact kind of thing.  The plungers may still be up but at least a little of those brightly colored experimental chemicals must’ve gone into him.  That’s a nasty finale.  Ok, ok, we find out that the villain doesn’t die from this but he probably should have.  I mean with so many syringes a few had to have hit vital organs.

- The motivation for the villain is the one really dark aspect of the film.  He gets hired by some guy to test an exploding bullet and naturally a big dog is the perfect test subject.  I mean what else could you possibly use?  A melon, a pig carcass, a ballistics gel body?  Nah.  Use a live dog.  Alright, even if you wanted to use a real dog why is the villain hell bent on having Beethoven?  Why not buy your own dog, get one from a shelter or nab one off the street?  There’s no reason given why this specific dog has to be the test subject for an exploding fucking bullet. 

- This was written by John Hughes and marks the beginning of his downfall.  You could argue Curly Sue was the start but I think that has a little more charm than this picture.

- It’s a little strange that you never really learn some major characters’ names in this like the villain, the wife, the youngest daughter and the henchmen. 

- This sonuvabitch was a big goddamn hit. They made six fucking sequels with the first one coming out the very next year.  Beethoven fever had hit the country.

In conclusion, there’s a lot of wacky shit in this thing.