Hot Dog… The Movie (1983)
As I explained in our last episode, I’d once seen at least a little of this movie back in 1984 when my mom decided to take 9 year-old me to the movies to see some foolish comedy. When you told me this was going to be my next assignment, I think I’d estimated I saw about 20-25 minutes of this. Yeah, no. I saw maybe 10 minutes max, because even though it was 42 years ago, I vividly remember seeing full-frontal nudity when the protagonists check into a hotel. And wow, did that ever make an impression.
So, obviously I wasn’t expecting this thing to reach any high bar. What I didn’t expect was that for about twenty or thirty minutes, I actually thought there might be a movie here.
Unfortunately, that hope gradually slides downhill faster than any skier in the film.
The biggest problem with Hot Dog isn’t simply that it’s filled with clichés. Plenty of entertaining movies are built from familiar tropes. The problem is that this movie mistakes clichés for storytelling. Every character is an archetype, every plot point is predictable, and almost nobody grows or changes in any meaningful way. Instead of taking familiar ingredients and doing something clever with them, the screenplay simply checks them off like a grocery list.
You’ve got the hard-drinking, wise-cracking veteran. The rebellious hitchhiker with attitude. The arrogant European rival. The sexy older woman who has to “inspect” all the new talent. The bumbling idiot who somehow qualifies for an elite skiing competition despite barely functioning as a human being. The Asian team-member who only speaks Japanese (but was played by an actor who couldn’t speak Japanese.)
Corporate interests rig the competition against the free-spirited Americans. Practical-joke revenge plots ensure. Underage sex is treated as completely normal and a date-rape joke somehow made it into the finished movie. And, of course, the movie ends with an absurd final competition where the rules are thrown out so the climax can become a gladiator-style downhill race.
The clichés simply are never built upon. They arrive exactly as expected, perform their assigned function, and leave exactly as they entered.
Patrick Houser stars as Harkin, our skiing wunderkind, and while he’s perfectly pleasant, he’s almost aggressively bland. His “aw shucks” small-town innocence is dialed up so high that he practically disappears whenever he’s sharing the screen with someone who has an actual personality. He’s not really given an arc, either. He’s already the best skier, already the nicest guy, already humble. The movie spends the rest of its runtime waiting for everyone else to acknowledge what we already know.
Cheryl Smith fares a little better as Sunny, the teenage hitchhiker Harkin picks up along the way. The two actually have some sweet chemistry in the first act, and for a while it feels like the relationship might anchor the film. But then the screenplay completely loses interest in developing either character. Sunny is introduced as abrasive, distrustful and fiercely independent, but we’re never told why. The movie hints at an interesting subplot where she’s going to learn to ski after buying all this new equipment…and then simply abandons the idea. By the end she’s magically transformed into the supportive girlfriend because the script says it’s time for the movie to end, not because she’s actually experienced any emotional growth.
Neither Houser nor Smith would go on to much of note afterward. Houser’s performance doesn’t exactly scream “future leading man,” but Smith actually shows flashes of charisma here. She may simply have deserved better material than this screenplay was willing to give her.
David Naughton, only a few years removed from An American Werewolf in London, shows up as Dan, the hard-drinking veteran who’s basically doing the Bill Murray role. He’s enjoyable enough, thanks mostly to his own charisma, even if he’s playing another stock character. It’s a shame his career never really reached those American Werewolf heights again.
Then there’s Shannon Tweed as Sylvia, the oversexed “inspector of new talent.” Just two years removed from being Playboy’s Playmate of the Year, she actually brings more charm to the role than it probably deserves. Unfortunately, this also became the blueprint for much of her career: Hollywood recognized she was beautiful and charismatic, then spent the next decade asking her to take her clothes off in erotic thrillers instead of giving her more substantial roles.
Behind the camera, director Peter Markle has the résumé of a dependable working television director, and that’s pretty much what you get here. The indoor scenes are functional at best—lots of static wide shots, routine coverage, and sex scenes that somehow manage to be both gratuitous and oddly mechanical.
Then everyone walks outside.
The skiing sequences are legitimately impressive. They’re beautifully photographed, they capture the speed and scale of the mountain incredibly well, and it’s obvious where a large chunk of the budget went. Yes, it’s often obvious the actors have been replaced by actual skiers, and yes, the movie grinds to a halt every time another extended ski montage begins, but from a purely technical standpoint they’re impressive.
It’s almost like Warren Miller wandered onto the set, shot some gorgeous skiing footage…and then got bored halfway through because he realized someone was trying to attach a story to it.
Director of Photography Paul Ryan deserves some credit for that work, although this isn’t one of those cases where you’re watching an undiscovered master before Hollywood came calling. Ryan had a solid career, much of it as a second-unit cinematographer, and mostly on fairly forgettable productions. This simply appears to be one of the better-looking movies he ever photographed. In fact, for whatever reason, the print of this movie available on Amazon Prime is ridiculously clear. Perhaps TOO clear. At one point, this dunce member of the American Ski Team I mentioned ends up making out with a random hot girl on a gondola and she undoes his ski suit, revealing his stomach. Mike, no lie, the image is so clear YOU CAN SEE LINT IN THE DUDE’S BELLY BUTTON. Distressing? Yes.
At the end of the day, Hot Dog: The Movie isn’t incompetent. It has attractive locations, impressive skiing, and a cast that’s occasionally more charming than the screenplay deserves.
But every interesting idea it introduces gets abandoned. Every character is a stereotype. Every conflict resolves itself with almost no effort. The romance never earns its conclusion, the competition lacks any real tension, and what begins as a mildly promising comedy eventually devolves into an endless parade of montages, neon ski suits, and missed opportunities.
It’s a movie that feels convinced we’ve never seen any of this before, when in reality we’ve seen all of it—and done much, much better. Hell, it even ends with one of the most basic film cliches of all time: a freeze frame of the lead character as he’s lauded for his success!
BOTTOM FIVE CLICHES
#5: cars explode because physics gave up.
In real life, cars crash all the time without turning into fireballs. In movies, a sedan can clip a mailbox and detonate like it was transporting dynamite, napalm and the Ark of the Covenant. The tires squeal, the car flips once, and boom — mushroom cloud.
This is all over action cinema, especially in the ’80s and ’90s. Cobra is a good example because that movie treats cars less like vehicles and more like disposable fireworks with steering wheels. But the cliché is so common it has basically become its own visual language. If a car goes over a cliff, into a wall, or sometimes merely gets looked at with hostile intent, we know what happens next.
And I get it. Explosions are exciting. But at some point, movies convinced an entire generation that every Ford Taurus was one pothole away from becoming the Hindenburg.
#4: ENHANCE!
Now, I want to be fair here. Blade Runner gets away with this because it’s science fiction, and the photo-analysis scene actually fits the world. Deckard isn’t just yelling at a JPEG; he’s using futuristic tech in a futuristic movie.
But once spy thrillers and cop movies got hold of this idea, it became one of the dumbest miracles in cinema. Someone pulls up security footage from a gas station camera made out of a potato, zooms in 800 percent, says “enhance,” and suddenly they can read the reflection of a license plate in someone’s cornea.
It’s always the same rhythm, too.
“Can you zoom in?”
“Enhance.”
“Closer.”
“Enhance.”
“Can you rotate the image?”
Rotate the image? It’s a flat photograph, Gary.
Movies like Patriot Games, Rising Sun, and Enemy of the State live in that zone where surveillance technology is treated like a genie. The computer doesn’t process information. It grants wishes. It turns pixels into plot.
#3: The twelve-second explanation.
This is when a movie needs another twenty minutes of conflict, so one character either refuses to explain something, refuses to listen to an explanation, or storms away before anyone can finish the sentence that would end the movie.
“You don’t understand!”
“Then explain it.”
“I can’t!”
Why not? You’ve been standing here arguing for four minutes.
Romantic comedies absolutely love this shit. Hitch may be one of my favorite examples because Sara discovers that Will Smith is the mysterious Date Doctor and assumes he helped some sleazebag seduce and dump her friend. Except Hitch had specifically refused to help the guy because he knew he was a sleazebag. Sara doesn’t know that, destroys his reputation anyway, and — this is important — she is a fucking reporter. Apparently the one thing this investigative journalist forgot to investigate was the entire reason she was angry.
Notting Hill does it twice. At one point Hugh Grant overhears Julia Roberts dismissing him to another actor and just leaves, only to learn later that she was trying to protect their relationship from a gossip.
Shrek practically builds its entire third act around it. Shrek overhears Fiona talking about how nobody could love something so hideous and ugly, assumes she means him, gets pissed off, and never asks the obvious question. She was talking about herself. One sentence fixes everything.
But my favorite may be Twilight: New Moon. Edward calls Bella’s house, Jacob says her father is “at the funeral,” and Edward immediately assumes Bella is dead, hangs up and flies to Italy to commit suicide.
One question.
“Whose funeral?”
That’s it. Whole climax gone.
And that’s this cliché in its purest form. The audience knows exactly what would solve the problem. The characters probably know what would solve the problem. But the screenplay needs another twenty minutes, so everyone temporarily loses the ability to communicate like a functioning human being.
It’s not drama. It’s a restraining order placed on basic conversation.
#2: coughing equals death.
This is one of the greatest pieces of movie shorthand ever invented. A character coughs once, and the audience immediately starts measuring them for a coffin.
And if they cough into a handkerchief? Forget it. If they open that handkerchief and there’s a little spot of blood, that character has maybe twelve minutes left, unless they’re in a three-hour prestige drama, in which case they’ll bravely deteriorate until awards season.
This goes way back, especially in period dramas where tuberculosis was basically the official disease of tragic beauty. Moulin Rouge! leans all the way into it with Satine. Tombstone gives Doc Holliday that death-warmed-over cough as part of his whole haunted gunslinger thing. Even President Snow in the later Hunger Games movies gets the ominous blood cough, because nothing says “this man’s reign is ending” like dabbing your mouth and discovering the plot.
And it’s never just a cough. Nobody in movies ever has allergies, or dry air, or a Triscuit caught wrong. No. If you cough in a movie, you are either dying, concealing that you are dying, or about to tell someone, “It’s nothing,” which means you are super dying.
#1: flashbacks or video recordings that are literally just footage from the movie.
This one drives me insane.
A character remembers something, and instead of showing memory in a subjective or interesting way, the movie just replays the exact scene we already watched — same angles, same edits, same dramatic close-ups, sometimes even scenes the character wasn’t present for.
How are you remembering the reverse shot, Steve? Were you hiding inside the camera?
Sequels do this constantly, especially horror sequels. Friday the 13th Part 2 opens with a huge chunk of recap from the first movie, because apparently we needed the world’s longest “previously on a machete.” But Star Trek III: The Search for Spock may be my favorite example, because Kirk watches a security recording that somehow includes footage from Star Trek II shot from the actual movie’s dramatic camera angles. Starfleet security cameras apparently had better coverage than Spielberg.
This is the king of lazy cinematic memory. It’s not just reminding the audience what happened. It’s the movie turning to us and saying, “Remember that scene? Here it is again. We already paid for it.”
And that’s why it’s my number one cliché.