Something Streaming This Way Comes: "Oh! Heavenly Dog" (1980)
It can’t possibly be any sort of surprise to anyone reading this newsletter that I’ve been a pop culture fan for virtually as long as I’ve been alive. I started to study books of trivia and absorbed the various volumes of The Book of Lists before I’d even hit double digits, and I’ve lost count of how many books I bought or checked out of the library that were about movies, TV series, and even radio shows that began well before I was born.
As such, it probably also won’t come as a shock that I have many fond memories of seeing movies when I was a kid, and while I’ll be the first to admit that many of those films haven’t exactly aged like a fine wine, I still have enough sentimentality toward them that I enjoy revisiting them once in awhile…and one such film, as you’ve obviously deduced by now, is Oh! Heavenly Dog, that lone cinematic vehicle which dared to pair Chevy Chase and Benji.
When I saw Oh! Heavenly Dog in the theater, I would’ve been just on the cusp of entering those aforementioned double digits…or at least I presume that’s the case. It was released on July 11, 1980 (my sister’s 7th birthday, as it happens), and since I turned 10 years of age just slightly over a month later, I doubt it would’ve still been in our local theater—the long-gone Great Bridge Twin—at that point.
I bring up my age mostly to underline the fact that the big selling point for me was neither Chevy Chase nor Jane Seymour. I hadn’t yet seen any of Chevy’s previous films, and given that puberty was still a few years off, I didn’t fully appreciate Jane’s onscreen presence. No, this was a straight up Benji flick, as far as I was concerned, and anything else was incidental.
The premise, just in case you missed the boat on this early ‘80s cable standard, involves London-based P.I. Benjamin Browning (Chase), who gets hired for a gig as a bodyguard. When he goes to visit the woman he’s supposed to be guarding, Browning finds her flat unlocked, stumbles upon her dead body, and almost immediately thereafter ends up murdered himself. This, however, is only the beginning of the story, as Browning—now in the afterlife—is given the opportunity to solve his own murder by returning to Earth. The only downside: he goes back as a dog (Benji). On the other hand, he does end up being able to spend time in the company of writer Jackie Howard (Seymour), a woman he bumped into on the street not long before his murder and had hoped to go out on a date with. What are the odds?
Watching it now, I can absolutely still understand why I was so taken with it as a kid. There are plenty of fun scenes driven by a combination of Benji’s antics and Chevy’s deadpan delivery of his voiceover. In fact, in retrospect, I think this may well have been a building block in my appreciation of deadpan humor, if an unlikely one. The other key figure in the film’s main cast is Omar Sharif, and if he wasn’t already dead, I’m sure it would kill him to know that this is forever and always the film I most associate him with.
Also in the film is former Laugh-In star Alan Sues, and to say that he delivers an outrageously flamboyant performance is somehow still understating just how far over the top he goes in his brief on-camera role. Later in the film, we find out that his character—previously established as a horrible driver—was killed in a car crash, and he’s been reincarnated as a cat, one who keeps checking out Benji’s undercarriage in a way that would’ve gone completely over my head at age 10 but which made me completely cringe at age 52.
Oh! Heavenly Dog definitely isn’t a great film, but whether you want to blame it on nostalgia or just questionable taste in comedy, I don’t think it’s terrible, either. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I legitimately enjoyed revisiting it. But having said that, I can see why it’s viewed in such a dim light. The Benji aspects of the film make it seem like it should be family fun, but the murder mystery and the occasional attempts at titillation make it an awkward combination that probably annoyed parents and left other moviegoing adults looking for more. You may feel the same way, but thanks to some kind soul on YouTube, you’ve got a chance to find out for yourself…