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Upsetting Day: Masks for Children
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Upsetting Day: Nathfield đ
Lately, I’ve been asking myself a question I know no one else on earth ever has: whatever happened to that Garfield cult? You may recall around nine months ago, I set out to explore Garfield cookbooks, ruined my health, and discovered an Instagram cult run by a vengeance obsessed former Garfield restaurant owner. So, you know, a pretty typical Monday here at 1900Hotdog.
Since that article ran, I’ve been keeping an eye on the evolution of Nathfield, the knock-off Garfield cartoon created by the former owner of GarfieldEATS, Nathen Mazri. If you missed the first article all you need to know about Nathen is that he was spurned by Garfield and it made him go insane. His claim to fame was being “the world’s youngest Garfield Licensee,” and when he lost the license, he invented Nathfield, a cat in an orange suit who loves cheese and religious extremism.
If you want to get a cartoon made, a good way to start is to generate interest on social media, so that’s what Nathen did. Nathfield’s 341 Twitter followers get occasional updates on his thoughts about life, sperm, and which celebrities are going to Hell. (Spoiler alert, it’s most of them). Nathfield is the uncle that Garfield dreads having Thanksgiving dinner with. He is the From line when the Subject line says “FWD: New Evidence on Odie’s Laptop PROVES Jon Dog S3x Plot.”
You would think promoting a cartoon would mainly involve tweeting jokes, maybe some artwork, not going full the-water-is-turning-the-Nermals-gay on your silly cartoon cat twitter. I can’t begin to think of a way to go about this that is more wrong. I guess maybe it could be worse if he decided to promote his cartoon by kicking Betty White’s ass. Or by claiming… uh, Allah told him CO2 was harmless? Especially to sperm?
Sure, he does use the account to share some concept art and fill us in on the details of his characters. That’s how I know Nathfield loves cheese and styling his hair. It’s also how I know that Angel Gabby doesn’t menstruate. I didn’t need to know that, but I do. Angel Gabby and I are now way closer than I ever expected.
The Nathfield Twitter account is part social activism and part cartoon promotion, but it’s mostly where Nathen goes to rant when things go wrong in his life. Nathen has a lousy trip to Walmart, and Nathfield tweets at them to say their stores have “become mad houses for criminals.” Nathen gets angry at Andrew Garfield for wearing an orange suit and being named Garfield, and Nathfield is right there to supportively retweet his rage.
You might expect all of Nathen’s time to be taken up angrily tweeting Nathfield’s thoughts on the Amber Heard trial, but Nathfield is not Nathen’s main current business venture. Before I tell you what appears to be his primary business at the moment, you better get a fucking hat so you can hold on to it. While this man is soft launching his punitive Garfield rip-off, he’s also looking to promote an app and website called Egeez that will allow people to buy officially licensed merchandise.
The idea behind Egeez, maybe?, is that consumers are horrified by the idea of knockoff merchandise and need somewhere that they know for certain all of the profits from their Lightning McQueen wine decanter are going directly into Mickey Mouse’s pocket. Basically, this unlicensed Garfield character has created an extra step in the retail process in the desperate hopes of saving Disney’s lawyers some work and nothing else. His idea is basically “Hot Topic” but with more of a copyright law theme. Wow, what a business model! No one tell this man about Amazon or any other commerce website. He’ll be crushed. Or maybe he knows this is stupid and it’s a failure fetish? I only mention it because this is the real, unaltered copy on his website:
Obviously, Egeez is difficult to explain. I didn’t understand it until I listened to Nathen Mazri’s interview about it on the debut episode of The Nathfield podcast. Yes, Egeez is the sole sponsor of the “Adult Comedy Cartoon Podcast show” The Nathfield. In fact, the entire first episode of the podcast, titled “Egeez presents The Nathfield,” is a segment from another podcast called “Picture Time O Clock,” where Nathen was interviewed about Egeez. It doesn’t mention Nathfield at all. It’s just a boring pitch for his website wherein he bashes Redbubble and Etsy for selling counterfeit merchandise as if most people think that’s a bug of those sites and not a feature.
It’s a bold move to feature a nine minute long commercial as the first episode of your podcast, but Nathen Mazri is a big swing kind of guy. He also said that Egeez would soon have a launch party in ten cities. He tweeted that Nick Cave would be making music for Nathfield. This is a man three years deep into a breakup with Garfield that has wrecked his mind and soul. He can’t be expected to make sense all the time.
If you’re wondering about the content of the podcast, it’s about what you would expect from a man who can’t even complete a promotional tweet for his show without also calling out Mindy Kaling for making Velma Indian and being a “nymphomaniac.” All he had to do was tweet “hey look, a new episode of my podcast is out,â without sneaking in something weird and aggressive, and he couldn’t do it. He often pitches himself as a master of branding, but the number one thing brands don’t do is tweet about controversial topics. If Nathen were in charge of Wendy’s Twitter account, it would be like, “fries are half off today; also, Kanye did nothing wrong. #juniorbaconcheeseburgers are named that because they’re #children. Reclaim your virginity with #vaginacement bye”
If you like a lot of loud chewing and snorting, I can highly recommend the first episode of the Nathfield podcast to you. It’s technically titled episode “1- Evil Vs. Angel” and Nathfield is still not in it. First, they introduce the story’s villain, a pig man named Bill Cramer, who’s aiding the Dajjal, an Islamic Antichrist figure, by posting on Reddit and overeating. Nathfield introduced him on Twitter via a Nespresso ad that I’m sure Nespresso would beg him to take down if they were aware of its existence.
The episode begins with Bill Carmer doing a monologue about greed and God, kind of accusing God of being a pervert because he “likes to watch,” and we’re all here for his own “cosmic gag reel.” He also mentions that he hates Nathfield because he “rises, sleeps, and eats cheese all day.” When a ghostly voice calls his name, he says, “step-mommy, is that you, bitch?” I think that’s Nathen Mazri’s idea of a joke. One of those really sophisticated ones where the punchline is that bitch is a no-no word.
The voice turns out to be Angel Gabby. They do a monologue about how Nathfield is Jesus. “Nathfield pisses me off too, always fixing his hair, but he’s our sole savior and warrior with cattitude in today’s digital war on earth. No one can save us but Nathfield, the prince of Nazareth.” Is this a podcast about a cat who hates Mondays or Nathen Mazri’s pitch to be the Islamic Kirk Cameron?
Finally, in episode three, we get to hear Nathfield for the first time. The first thing the hero of this story says is, “Ah, what a glorious morning. Makes me hard. Oh my God. Go away, temptation!” The first words our savior speaks in this series are to his boner. Then he’s visited by the angel Gabby, and this is how that conversation goes:
Nathfield: “Are you the angel of death? Is my time up already? I’ve barely started my fast food chain, NathfieldEATS.”
Gabby: “Fuck your cheesy fast food chain, and listen to me. I SAID it is important news from the one king of the worlds. Get it? Or is there too much hair paste in your brain?”
Nathfield: “How dare you!”
Gabby: “You sound like Andrew Tate now!”
Nathfield: “And you sound like the scammy little green child Greta.”
Gabby: “The time has come for a hero to rise up and save the world from corruption, and that hero is you, Nathfield.”
I know a lot of that seems completely disconnected, but I transcribed it word for word. The acting is done by two people who went through the kindergartner school of drama where the louder you are, the more you are acting, so they’re screaming at each other and taking big, long breaths right into the microphone the entire time, which made it even harder to follow and transcribe.
So that’s what’s going on there. He also dropped a third episode the day I needed to turn in this article that contained a theme song for Nathfield that’s an edited jingle for GarfieldEATS I’m pretty sure Nick Cave didn’t write. It has the vibe of someone Photoshopping their new girlfriend’s head over their ex-wife in their wedding photos.
The lyrics are also just the words love me, feed me, don’t leave me, in various poppy arrangements. That was the slogan for GarfieldEATS so it doesn’t have anything to do with Nathfield, unless he’s supposed to be a fan of GarfieldEATS? Maybe in the canon of this story, NathfieldEATS was going to be a ripoff of GarfieldEATS. Nathfield is holding a signature GarfieldEATS Garficcino in the main promotional photo they used for all social media, so it does exist in his world, but my guess would be it’s on its way to getting a smiting from Nathfield.
It feels like Nathen Mazri is an avatar for this website, or at least my little corner of it. I’m genuinely worried I did something to summon this man into our world; maybe in my sleep, I accidentally drew a pentagram and put shitty food, a Garfield keychain, and a Dennis Miller book in it. I hope someday Nathen succeeds in his mission to ruin Garfield, or Garfield ruins him. Either way, I’m in.
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Upsetting Day: Prime Mover đ
In the 1980s, we had one powerful comedy bit: partiers crash the squares. Got a stuffy graduation ceremony? Not with Coors Light you donât, crack one open and there are bikini girls under those robes. Professors are playing frisbee with the mortarboards. The dean is breakdancing. Every hair metal video was about a rock band exploding through the wall of the DMV and forcing the secretly hot clerk to make out in front of the license machine. At the end her license photo would have the whole band in it, and sheâd be certified to operate class D vehicles. But every once in a while a complete lunatic would get a hold of that bit and wildly misunderstand it. Letâs talk about Zodiac Mindwarp and The Love Reaction. Letâs do it because of the name, because they kick ass, because they might have been a parody of hair metal from inside hair metal at the peak of hair metal, and the only thing thatâs crazier is if they werenât â but mostly because nothing misunderstood âcrashing the squaresâ like their video for âPrime Mover.â
The video opens with young women sleeping peacefully in a church, like total squares. Not one is doing a bikini kegstand, itâs utter bullshit. Theyâre all together in one giant room like a field hospital, so letâs assume theyâre nuns in training. The alternative is that this is a Catholic girlâs school, and thatâs far too horrifying to contemplate. This context is worrying enough, since anything a 1980s hair metal band is about to do to young nuns in training is something we once considered antics, and now realize was assault.
The roiling sky parts, and a rock ân roll zeppelin descends as âPrime Moverâ opens with Zodiac crooning âyeeeeahhh yeah yeah yeahâ in the same way David Lee Roth might, if he was being arrested on Drunk and Disorderly charges by a female police officer who bent over and the ass of her pants exploded revealing the thong beneath. Itâs the herald riding ahead of an approaching crime, is what Iâm saying.
And itâs coming from Zodiac Mindwarp himself, who looks like he plays a rock Nazi in a burlesque retelling of Schindlerâs List.
One of my favorite things is when a beam can do anything. Just a good all purpose beam, a beam for whatever you need. In âPrime Mover,â a laser is whatever you want it to be so long as you want Hepatitis B.
Letâs explore the first thing lasers can do. Hereâs a quiz: If you excite enough electrons in an optical materialâŚ
You can create dirtbags!
Zodiac Mindwarp is the Wizard of Dirtbags, the mystical source from which the mighty Dirtbag River flows. If you ever have need of a dirtbag â if you have an unsoiled couch in the basement that needs soiling, if you have a teenage daughter you wish wished she wasnât pregnant, if you have a cat thatâs not addicted to heroin and no dirtbag dying in your laundry room because he shot up cat food, you call Zodiac Mindwarp the Dirtbag Wizard and all your problems will be solved.
Iâll let him speak for himself.
One of the things I admire most is efficient storytelling. Bloodsport can set up all of Bloodsport using only an 11-minute montage of insane nesting flashbacks, thatâs a beautiful thing. Within seconds Zodiac Mindwarp establishes that heâs a rock ân roll fascist pervert with the mind of a child, and he will never prove himself wrong. Itâs the shortest, most complete and nuanced warning a human being can issue short of talking about Web3.
The next lines are âI came from the sky like a 747, Iâm the bad boy baby I fell out of heavenâ – hey, thatâs exactly what happened in the video so far! This is one of those videos that just scene-for-scene depicts the song, like watching Sir Mix-A-Lotâs sign language translator shake her ass, which in sign language means âshake that ass.â The implication here is that âPrime Mover,â the song, is about the devil descending from space in a blimp to assault prospective nuns. Thatâs all it takes to be my favorite song ever and weâre not 30 seconds in. I canât wait to see what the next lyrics are-
Oh, it was Chekhovâs Hat. Always believe a Nazi when they tell you theyâre a Nazi.
Iâm not being fair. Thereâs important context here! For a time, rock ân roll was obsessed with Nazis. There was a window in the mid-1970s between WWII being so antiquated that the idea Nazis could make a comeback was ridiculous, and the comeback of the Nazis. Itâs like how we can make 9/11 jokes today, but not two years from now when 11/9 happens. Ironically appropriating Naziism was an instant, easy way to rile up the older generation, and there ainât nothinâ more rock ân roll than rilinâ. Itâs why this picture of David Bowie exists.
It looks like he has a skeleton hand, and maybe he did. Thatâs a very Bowie thing to do. But heâs actually giving the Nazi salute. In 1976, Bowie renamed himself the Thin White Duke and started romanticizing facism because it pissed off your grandpa, and also cocaine. Those are the same reasons The Ramones wrote a song that goes âIâm a Nazi baby, Iâm a Nazi, yes I am.â God bless those pure and simple boys. So okay, within this window in the mid-1970s and with this specific cultural context, you can forgive a rock band making Nazi references. âPrime Moverâ was recorded twelve years after that window closed.
No time to think about that thereâs a NUN ABDUCTION!
The classic signs of impending alien abduction are clocks stopping, unexplained magnetism, and bright lights flooding the room. The sign of a Space Dirtbag abduction is when they drive a tank through your wall.
I guess technically this is some kind of APC vehicle but if A, P, and C all stood for different, more vulgar things. Does an APC vehicle count as a van if you fill it with dirtbags? I would argue yes, but only if someone uses a Snickers wrapper and a rubber band as a condom inside it.
Zodiac Mindwarp the Dirtbag Wizard explodes through a stained glass window singing-
Which is very worrying to the young nuns, but they donât worry for long-
They accept death very quickly.
Especially since the next line is âyour lipstick flickers around my lightning rod.â Again, such efficiency – the human brain is great at denial. If five dirtbags and the devil they worship destroy your bedroom with military hardware youâll still manage to think âI can get away, I can bargain with this, maybe they just want my money.â If Trans Am Satan here arrives in a wave of flames promising napalm blowjobs, you know to start swallowing your fillings so the dental records wonât match that way mom and dad can harbor a little hope.
I swear to god I didnât know this had a hot dog reference in it. I caught a few key lyrics and the dirtbag laser show and I thought âthis is for me; this is my art.â But somehow the song already knew that. The amount of bizarre hot dog references in the things we cover makes me suspect some sort of timelost entity is begging for help, seeding wieners through garbage history, knowing one of you can save them with your secret ability to slip your lightning rod between worlds like the Subtle Knife.
Anyway, everybody knows that when you excite the electrons in an optical material you canâŚ
Oh, that oneâs normal! Zodiac Mindwarp the Dirtbag Wizard can ignite fires on small objects, like a frightened teenâs teddy bear, but only when powered by a little hump first.
Itâs time for a heil Hitler break:
This accompanies the Sex Fuhrer line, in case you thought there was some kind of context that could save Sex Fuhrer. I forgot to mention that line is in the chorus and will be repeated several times, I guess thatâs important too.
Letâs explore the next use of lasers: When you excite electrons in an optical material, every first year science student knows it-
Creates skanks.
But ONLY when channeled through a climaxing guitar (every first year science student knows a solo is a guitar cumming).
Letâs take a break from lasers and examine the practical uses of lightning. When the electrons in a cloud are attracted to protons at a lower point, any meteorologist can tell you what that means.
It means you can summon and control skanks.
The science here is very clear: a guitar solo can blast lasers that create skanks, but it can never control them. Those are wild skanks, and if left unchecked they will steal all the change from that bowl you keep on the table and insert your toothbrush into themselves, leaving you a note on a cocktail napkin thatâs just a lipstick kiss with a cold sore imprint in it. A skank can only be controlled by Skank Lightning, and thatâs a different branch of magic on the Dirtbag Skill Tree. You have to invest a lot of points in it, but at Dirtbag Level 45 you do get the ability to chain Skank Lightning, forcing any woman adjacent to a skank to save against Thrusting or take Pregnancy Damage.
Zodiac Mindwarp puts a little goof in his voice to call all the women disco reptiles and funky alligators, itâs wildly out of place in this song. But itâs necessary: We need a playful kind of innocence to break up the bizarre assaults; itâs a kind of molestation palate cleanser; itâs the thin slice of pickled ginger in between courses of power gropes and hair metal hitlers.
Everything so far demonstrates an escalation in the âcrashing the squaresâ mentality. We should be defying the system, tossing boring books out the window, and getting sexy with repressed ladies. Instead weâre playing with fascism, weâre exploding teddy bears with eye lasers, and weâre threatening nuns with lightning blowjobs. âPrime Moverâ is following the âcrash the squaresâ template, just cranking everything up to cosmic horror levels.
Now itâs time for the turn: The headmistress and two professors barge in on this â I guess itâs supposed to be a party, but it still scans as domestic terrorism. The teachers burst in to see what the ruckus is-
Wait, oh shit, theyâre teachers! That means this was supposed to be a school the whole time, and all of these girls were supposed to be minors, and everything weâve seen up until now, which was already many crimes, is now a different kind of crime prosecuted by a special unit.
Okay the teachers charge in to kill the party! Remember: This is a 1980s rock ân roll video, and letâs further specify that itâs one involving magical lasers. There are only two things that can happen next: Either Zodiac Mindwarp the Dirtbag Wizard zaps the squares away to someplace they canât handle, like a stripclub or the inside of an APC. Or heâs going to zap them all into attractive women, and theyâll join the party â the people they once were screaming inside their own brains for all eternity as they grind and lick men with visible diseases who taste like a gas station bathroom.
So, letâs explore the next use of lasers: Everyone knows when you excite HOLY SHIT-
He just, he just murders them. He unleashes his full satanic might with no party filter and explodes their heads like theyâre rookie scanners coming for the champ. Jesus Christ this violates every rule of the Party Accords of 1983. The finest rock lawyers in the world could never convince a party jury this was a shenanigan.
The tone of âPrime Moverâ was already way off, but it was like somebody taking Spuds McKenzie too far. âWhoa! Spuds is here to party! That means everyone around us should be forced to party against their will, or be detained!â Itâs technically the road you should be driving on, youâre just going too fast. Straight up murdering everyone who stands in the way of partying is the second act turn in a horror movie about Spring Break. This is no longer Spuds McKenzie at all. âWhoa, Spuds is here to party OH NO heâs mauling everyone whoâs not partying!â Itâs technically the road you should be driving on, but youâre crashing a plane into it.
Whatâs next, how does a Dirtbag Wizard even escalate from here? Does Zodiac Mindwarp fly off in their rock balloon and nuke the site from orbit because itâs the only way to be sure no buzzkills survive?
Thank you for learning about my favorite music video.
âŚ
Thanks to nanomano for the hot Hot Dog Tip!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Seren, a level 60 Skankomancer with enchanted nips.
If these images are borked, you can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.
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Upsetting Day: Wuthering High đ
In 2015 James Caan did a Lifetime original movie produced by The Asylum called Wuthering High. I found out about this while covering the production of James Caan classic Undercover Grandpa and set it aside, assuming one day I would be in the mood to watch a sexy teen adaptation of a tragic gothic romance. That day never came. It turns out I will never be in the mood to watch James Caan’s Lifetime movie debut. So I sat down this weekend and took it all in anyway. It was different from any of the other Lifetime movies I’ve seen, which usually heavily involve the magic of Christmas.
I can’t help but imagine how disappointing this movie must have been for the younger cast members. I feel like there’s a scenario where they first learned they were going to be in a movie with Academy Award⢠nominated actor, James Caan, and then that the movie was going to be on Lifetime. And produced by the makers of Sharknado. That’s like learning you’ve won the lottery, in Guam, where the lottery prizes are all poisonous snakes. Have you ever seen anything this unappealing?
The thing about taking Emily Bronte’s tale of obsession and multigenerational trauma and adapting it to the modern age is it seems really dumb. These kids could be playing XBOX instead of mentally torturing each other. Also, they didn’t have the time or the budget to display the generational aspect of the novel, so the main character Cathy is sort of a combination of two characters in the book, Catherine and her daughter Cathy. Also, instead of Heathcliff and Catherine growing up together, Heath and Cathy meet and fall in love in one day, but they’re so in love he digs up her grave and crawls in with her when she dies a week later. Again, in an era where God Of War requires 51 hours of playtime I just don’t see that happening.
The movie opens with Cathy lying on the floor of her school, staring up at the ceiling. She explains how she’s never been the same since she found her mother dead of suicide. Now she mostly spends her time drawing pictures of her dead mother and flaming skulls while straddling a notebook on the floor of her high school art room. So haunted. So troubled.
Meanwhile, Heath, the bad boy, comes home from quitting his job by spray painting the words I QUIT onto a mirror and finds his family being deported to Mexico. He’s taken in by Cathy’s wealthy widowed father, who was also his mother’s boss. That’s the role James Caan plays with the energy and enthusiasm of Eeyore on Ambien. I’ve never seen someone look more tired in a movie, which does kind of work for the role. He makes a lot of stupid decisions you can write off as the character needing a nap.
Cathy and Heath immediately hit it off, and we get this weird scene where they have sex in a pantry that is cut with a monologue of Cathy telling Heath how much she misses her mom. We’re supposed to insinuate that they have bonded over their missing parents, which also made them very horny. Ok, sure, that sounds like teenagers, I guess?
Heath shows James Caan some very disturbing pictures Cathy drew of her mother with jewels coming out of a hole in her skull and he says, “Wow, that’s pretty good.” He’s so impressed by her talent and not worried about her at all! He’s so tired.
Even though Cathy is rich, she doesn’t have a car for some reason, so she’s driven to school by her drug addicted older brother, Lee, in his Porsche. I guess James Caan didn’t want to sell the Porsche and buy two Toyota Hyundais for some reason? Since Lee is constantly drunk or high, he’s not a great chauffeur, and he and Heath have a fight about that, but Heath doesn’t fight back. He lets Lee kick his ass so he’ll get in trouble with their dad. Uh oh, this gothic romance hero might have a dark side.
Cathy and Heath get closer and grow more destructive, but the movie doesn’t know what two out of control teens would do to cause trouble. There’s a weird scene where they get yelled at for talking during health class, and Cathy starts ripping up her textbook while Heath yells, “do it, do it!” Then all the other kids in the class also rip up their books and start dancing around in the pages for some reason.
The movie meets the book at a few intervals, my favorite of which is Cathy being attacked and mauled by a pack of dogs. She’s trying to sneak Heath into a party at her friend’s house he wasn’t invited to, and the friends have a beautiful husky and an Australian cattle dog that each grab a limb and shake her like a polaroid picture.
This mauling is treated as pretty normal and inconsequential for the dogs or Cathy. Cathy’s friend Eddie patches her up, and she goes to his party, freshly mauled and ready to dance. She’s mad at Heath because her friends told him to leave after she got mauled, and he did. Also, he stole a bunch of stuff from her dad’s safe and blamed her brother, who then got sent to rehab. Lots of red flag behavior from this gothic romance hero.
We start to get some botched famous quotes from Wuthering Heights sprinkled into the movie, and it’s extremely obvious when they happen because all of a sudden the dialogue is good. As Cathy and Heath fight at the dog mauling party, Heath grabs Cathy away from Eddie and says, “If he loved you forever with everything he had, he couldn’t love you as much as I do in one day.” The quote from the book is, “If he loved you with all the power of his soul for a lifetime, he couldn’t love you as much as I do in a single day.” I respect that they made it just a little bit worse so it would fit the tone of the movie more.
At this point, James Caan has made his one million dollars for three scenes, so he promptly exits the movie via heart attack offscreen. Conveniently, he leaves half of his money to Heath and half to Cathy so Lee can also exit the movie forever, which is great for budget reasons. For the last twenty minutes, this movie tosses out actors like it’s Kane in a Royal Rumble, a reference corrected by Sean during the copyediting process after I said “WWE cage match,” a type of wrestling event where you very specifically don’t throw people out.
Then the movie kicks into super speed because this plot is filling time between commercials for yogurt that makes you poop and medication that makes you stop pooping, and they need to fit a book’s worth of events into fifteen minutes. Heath first trashes Cathy’s former home by throwing a huge party at it she’s not invited to. He also starts hooking up with Cathyâs friend Bella and sits on a throne he found in her Cheesecake Factory-style house like he’s the king of the party.
Then he gets upset when Cathy is mad at him for trashing her childhood home and kissing her friend, so he goes to Mexico to look for his mom but returns the very next scene momless. We never find out what happened there, and it’s never brought up again because compressing a book into a movie is hard, which is probably why The Asylum hasn’t tried this again. When you remove time and nuance from this story, it’s pretty much just hormonal kids doing very dumb and chaotic things. It’s Riverdale but less fun because there are no super powered dogs or organ harvesting cult leaders. One super powered dog could fix this whole movie!
While Heath is gone, Cathy gets together with her friend Eddie, but she’s still in love with Heath, so they have a big dramatic confrontation by the seaside. Now we know Cathy can swim. We’ve seen her play in the ocean, and jump into a pool, but for some reason, as she’s telling Heath she can’t stop loving him, a big wave comes and sweeps her out into the ocean. At least, I think that’s what was supposed to happen; it’s just a single cut to her in the middle of the ocean all of a sudden.
At Cathy’s funeral, we get another line from the original book. “Heath loved Cathy so much. I figure he’ll just want to stretch himself over the grave and die like a faithful dog.” These people have known each other for a week. It can’t have been more than one week in the timeline of this movie. Yet Heath does love Cathy so much that he digs up the grave and crawls into the casket with her, which is how the movie ends.
Iâm not going to lie, that is a pretty hardcore ending. Not quite as impactful as the lingering tragedy of Wuthering Heights, but for a bargain basement version Iâm impressed that they even tried to compress crawling into the grave level obsession into an eighty minute movie. Still, it would have been better if they took the money for James Caan and allocated it to making the attack dogs talk and added just a dash of the Christmas spirit.
