There are two fairly common complaints you hear about the movies Hollywood is making these days. The first is that studios are focusing all their resources on huge summer blockbusters that are based on existing intellectual properties, or remakes of old hits, or sequels to remakes and films based on existing intellectual property, with the end result being an ever-narrowing selection of choices for people looking for cool original movies. Which is fair, all around, and shows no real sign of improving, as studios have various movies about various comic book universes scheduled out through the mid-2020s.
The second complaint is that there are not enough movies about talking ghost dog wedding planners. I hear this one all the time. “Why doesn’t Hollywood just make a nice movie about a talking ghost dog that plans a wedding?,” people say to me, at least once a week. And I get it. It’s been a failure from top to bottom, studio executives to aspiring screenwriters. People just don’t make movies about talking ghost dogs that plan wedding.
Until now.
That’s right, folks. Someone finally stepped up and made a movie about a talking ghost dog that plans a wedding. And that movie is called Best Friend From Heaven. And it has a trailer. Which is posted above. I really must insist you watch it. It is… something. It is definitely, almost aggressively something. I’m not sure I can even formulate all my thoughts on this into actual paragraphs with actual transitions, so instead, please allow me to present them as a series of notes.
– The plot, in short: A woman is preparing to get married. She appears to be hanging around her house — in her gown already? — before the wedding when tragedy strikes. Her beloved dog Gabriel gets hit by a car after chasing a squirrel into the street.
– At this point, we learn two things: One, the crash killed Gabriel and he went to Heaven, which we know because there is a shot of him talking to another dog while sitting on a fluffy white cloud. Two, the wedding was canceled and postponed indefinitely, which is actually kind of reasonable. I mean, canceling a wedding is a big deal, and a lot of very large deposits will go poof if you do it. On the other hand, can you imagine trying to get married, like, an hour after your beloved dog died suddenly? It’s all very sad.
– Luckily, there is very little time to be sad because we move quickly to my favorite moment of this trailer and maybe my favorite moment of any movie ever. Gabe heads back to Earth to settle his unfinished business of getting this wedding done, and he jogs into the backyard and says, I swear to God, “Hey guys, I’m back. I can talk now.”
– “Hey guys, I’m back. I can talk now.”
– I like to picture two writers pulling their hair out in a Hollywood coffee shop, frantically trying to figure out how to explain the part of their movie where the ghost dog explains his return and his newfound ability to speak English, until one of them bolts upright as though an idea possessed his entire body like a spirit from another dimension, then announces “What if the dog just says ‘Hey guys, I’m back. I can talk now’”?
– I don’t think I’ll ever get over this.
– Anyway, I guess most humans can’t hear or see Gabe, so he tracks down the one person who can, who understandably is concerned about the fact that he’s seeing a talking ghost dog who wants to plan a wedding, to the degree that he proceeds to take his own pulse on the street.
– I’m having fun with all of this, but please do imagine how you would react to a talking ghost dog accosting you on the sidewalk and demanding your assistance in planning a wedding. Also, think about a number that would concern you in this situation, pulse-wise. Like, how high do you think your pulse would have to be to hallucinate a talking ghost dog who wants to plan a wedding? I’m thinking low 700s.
– This movie caused an absolute frenzy in the Uproxx Slack movies room this afternoon, which led to a few important discoveries.
- One of the stars of this movie has a role in an upcoming film titled Sideboob
- The director of Sideboob also made movies titled Terrific Trucks and Terrific Trucks Save Christmas
- The summary of Terrific Trucks Save Christmas is “The trucks are just digging holes but then Christmas is being attacked, now it’s up to them to save Christmas.”
You know, that old holiday story.
– Also, this movie was produced by a company called Brain Power Studios, and I sincerely do recommend you take a quick scan of their YouTube page. Because that is where I found this. I must see this movie immediately.
– But back to ghost dogs. We have a wedding to plan. And plan it, they do. It looks like the whole town comes together to help them, which is very sweet and nice and also a little confusing because this is a shot from their actual wedding.
– Why is no one at the wedding? Why is the reverend walking her down the aisle? Is the reverend her dad? Does a ghost dog count as a witness, for official registration purposes? And if no one showed up at the wedding, why are all these people at the reception?
– All fair questions that one assumes the movie answers. Or not. After that whole “Hey guys, I’m back. I can talk now” thing, I don’t know what to expect. There’s a chance the whole crowd at the reception announces, in unison, “Sorry we missed the ceremony. We got lost.” I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s a mystery.
– The fact that it’s a mystery is a mystery itself, by the way, because it is the only part of this movie that is not completely spoiled by the trailer. And I don’t mean, like, the trailer spoiled all the good parts and funny jokes. I mean the trailer lays out the entire plot of the movie, from beginning to end, in under 90 seconds. We see the dog die, we see the dog come back to plan a wedding, we see the wedding. It’s incredible. It literally ends with Gabriel the ghost dog running on a cloud into a sunset, presumably returning to heaven after completing this one last task. It would be like if the trailer for The Sixth Sense revealed that Bruce Willis was dead the entire time. And if at some point it included the line “Hey guys, I’m back. I can talk now.” Which would be weird, because Bruce’s character could talk before he died. Because he was a human. So maybe that’s not a great analogy. Maybe it would work better if Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense had been a dog.
– That’s a free idea, by the way. Remake The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis’s character as a dog. Who plans a wedding. After getting hit by a car as his owner looks on in her wedding dress. Wait. Now I’m just pitching this movie. Is… is this a stealth Sixth Sense remake? I don’t see how we can rule this out.
– Let’s close on this: What do you think the strangest part of all this is? There are a lot of candidates, ranging from “lady hanging around her house on her wedding day in her gown” to “talking ghost dog plans a wedding” to “the fact that people funded this movie with actual money that they could have purchased, like, food with,” but for me, there’s a simpler answer. Summed up in one screencap. We are all going to see Best Friend From Heaven, even if we’ve all now kind of seen it already.
