4/10
Debuting on Blu-Ray this month from Scorpion (via Kino Lorber), C.H.O.M.P.S. (89 mins., 1979, PG) was a movie I remember watching as a kid – in fact, right before starting up Scorpion's Blu-Ray, Hoyt Curtin's insanely repetitive theme magically popped back into my head, like a buried relic of the past that still remained in my subconscious. There's a reason you'll never forget Curtin's music – it's like mixing his Hanna-Barbera work with Alan Silvestri's “CHIPS” episode underscores – and one of several reasons why you may regret ever watching this, a collaboration between the long-time Saturday morning animators and Samuel Z. Arkoff's American-International that was supposed to be the start of a long and fruitful contract between the two companies.
The end result would be the only picture they'd produce together – and Hanna-Barbera's sole big-screen, live-action movie, starring Wesley “Land of the Lost” Eure and a fetching, prime Valerie Bertinelli in the story of a robotic dog that offers the ultimate in home-security technology. Eure's creation, in fact, has super-canine strength and agility – elements that are vital to convincing Bertinelli's father (Conrad Bain from “Diff'rent Strokes”) that C.H.O.M.P.S. is worth taking a gamble on, all the while a pair of bumbling thieves (Chuck McCann and Red Buttons), working for Bain's competitors, try to stop the Benji-looking pup from really strutting his stuff.
Add in Jim Backus and you have all the ingredients for a late '70s kid movie, which “C.H.O.M.P.S” barely passes the bar for in terms of entertainment. The capable comic performances are lively enough, but the sound effects and slapstick shenanigans are heavy-handed – this is a veritable live-action cartoon, punctuated by Curtin's obnoxious scoring with a theme used so frequently you might be tempted to hit “mute” before it ends (or, worse, have it seared into your psyche for decades to come – like me!).
Another issue is a cranky neighborhood dog whose voice-over contains a pair of “s—t” expletives that are so mind-bogglingly unnecessary for this kind of film that they pushed the movie into PG territory. AIP re-edited the film to remove these needless profanities – making it more suited to the G-rated set the film was meant for – but this MGM-licensed Blu-Ray from Scorpion only includes the original PG-rated dialogue track. If you've got a little one around as I do, you might want to think twice about throwing this otherwise wan family comedy on for them.
Scorpion's disc also houses a 2K master (1.85) from an aged but relatively healthy source. Extras include an interview with Eure and commentary with Eure and co-writer Duane Poole, moderated by Nathaniel Thompson.