TERRY

One of my close friends, and she’s probably going to kill me for saying this, is one of those obsessed Dog Moms. The kind that gets Puppuccinos from Starbucks and, when she pulls through drive-throughs, is given a little mini-cone for her dog. She creates her own doggy costumes for her puppy, has a facebook profile for her and co-created an international holiday for her breed of dog. To top it off, her pup is a minor celebrity in the local dog world.

All this to say, Joe, that I have a Maggie (Judy Greer) in my life.

A mix of actually funny dialogue, a fantastic performance from Judy Greer and some nice moments of gore means I found myself almost completely engaged with Into the Dark’s latest episode “Good Boy,” even though it suffers from some of the same woes plaguing the series as a whole. It begins with some jaunty music; the kind you’d expect from a romantic comedy. And, in a sense, “Good Boy” operates in the romantic comedy realm much in the same way director Tyler MacIntyre’s Tragedy Girls utilized to such great effect.

Maggie is a thirty-nine year old woman trying to find love in the world of digital dating. She wants a family and she sees her chances of having a kid diminishing quickly due to her biological clock. While she’s not personally ready to have a baby, her body’s ticking clock certainly is. She’s a journalist for a local newspaper called The Yeller and at the same moment she makes the expensive decision to freeze her eggs ($10,000 for harvesting, $500 per year to keep on ice and $5,000 for thawing...yikes!) her paper has made the decision to go digital. As the anxiety piles on, Maggie decides to adopt an emotional support dog. She’s immediately drawn to a pup she eventually names Reuben (CHICO) when he sneaks her Reuben sandwich off the counter.

Maggie immediately finds herself feeling a lot more self-confident and starts getting back out into the world, going on dates, meeting new people and becoming a more cheerful person. Because the paper has gone digital, she picks up a side hustle at a coffee shop where she runs into Annie (Ellen Wong), a young woman she used to babysit. And as Maggie gets more social, she becomes more codependent on Reuben, who just might not be your normal dog…

I liked a lot about “Good Boy,” Joe! I particularly enjoyed the first act where we meet some of Maggie’s newspaper coworkers, like her boss Don (Steve Guttenberg). At the “not downsizing, transitioning” meeting, Guttenberg really lets loose with the corporate smarm, offering his employees breakfast and telling them everyone’s gotta be calm and flexible and be able to adjust. “No one’s being laid off,” he tells his staff. “You’re becoming independent contractors!” I also enjoyed the addition of Annie who moved to Los Angeles to build her own brand, a wellness and self-help sort of deal. Or, in her own words, “Namaste! Ell Oh Ell”

The way the narrative (written by brothers Aaron and Will Eisenberg) introduces the ominous nature surrounding Reuben is also initially well-crafted. Maggie’s first date, post-emotional support dog, is a mix of what I hate about the facade of online dating. When her date turns out to be, shocker, an asshole, the dog attacks him while Maggie’s in the bathroom, and he ends up getting hit by a hit-and-run car. So far, so good. But the middle section doesn’t do anything of interest with this dichotomy and I wish they had either spent more time on the script or, based on conversations I’ve heard about the development side of Into the Dark, were given more time to work on the script.

My biggest complaint is that there’s no escalating tension through the second act and the narrative beats hit typical slasher expectations, but don’t feel as fleshed out as they could be. For once I don’t think that this episode should have been capped at 60 minutes (which is the usual refrain we tend to bring up), but that the story could have used a bit more structure.

But what about you, Joe? Am I alone in my feelings about “Good Boy” or did Reuben charm you into submission? Did you like the introduction of Nate (McKinley Freeman) as both a love interest and a potential adversary? Did you care about the half-hearted police procedural subplot? And isn’t Judy Greer just a treat?

JOE

This one mostly worked for me, Terry, so I think we’ve found another winner!

Look, your friend may be a crazy dog lady, but I am “one of those gays” who has an obsession with Judy Greer (one need only listen to the Horror Queers’ episode on ‘Cursed’ to know how much I love this forever stuck-in-the-best-friend-role actress). Basically Greer is a super talented, incredibly funny lady who never gets her dues, so seeing her as the lead - even if it’s not a theatrical film - was really enjoyable.

So yes, Greer is a treat. And if you don’t think so, “Good Boy” won’t work well for you. This is 100% Greer’s movie - she’s in nearly every scene - and it’s a mostly great showcase for her deft mix of comedy, rom com and serious traits.

Intriguingly, despite the inherent silliness of a tiny killer dog and the...odd...directions the final act takes, there’s no shortage of feminist AF elements in this for women of a certain age. You mentioned both Maggie’s struggle to balance a career with her desire to start a family as a single woman, the completely ridiculous cost of freezing your eggs (WHO could afford that?!) and the challenges of finding single partners in a world that privileges carefully curated social media profiles.

There’s a heightened realism to all of this that feels very relevant. It’s not exactly revolutionary (the tale of a person who discovers a monkey’s paw that makes their life better right up until it fucks them over is some pretty foundational horror), but this single & modern & life in LA with influencers and the death of journalism...plays well.

Now, like a lot of these Into The Dark episodes, this plays better in the front half than the back half. As the bodies begin to pile up around Maggie and Reuben, the police procedural element kicks in, as do questions of Maggie’s sanity.

*For a hot moment, I was fully convinced that everything was a lucid egg-freezing dream and the episode would reveal that she had merely been under the influence for the back half. Kudos to the brothers Eisenberg for suggesting, but not caving to that impulse (“it was all a dream” narratives are deal-breakers for me, Terry).

You’re right, however, to suggest that making Nate both a police officer and a romantic interest helps to retain an undercurrent of conflict. I’ll confess that in the current political climate, I wasn’t in *quite* the right headspace for a traditionally heroic cop (I may have even cheered briefly when Maggie decides to murder her lover because she has a dog who loves her unconditionally).

Real life politics aside, this is a surprisingly murky moral entry of the series. At the end of the episode, Maggie is unequivocally a villain - she has accidentally murdered several people due to her whims (which Reuben picks up on) and Nate is 100% intentional - and even poor Elena, the landlady’s niece, is briefly locked up for the murders. This works for me in large part because it plays on Greer’s inherent likeability as an actress: if we didn’t want Maggie (as in Greer) to get away with it and get hers, the whole episode falls apart. It’s kinda ingenious casting, all things considering; I don’t know another actress who garners *this* kind of sympathy from audiences.

Terry, I’ll turn it back to you: do you think the feminist themes get polluted by Maggie’s descent into madness? Did MacIntyre’s staging (such as the blood splatter on the window for Guttenberg’s death) work for you? Were you surprised at who does and doesn’t survive? And what would you rate this entry?

TERRY

Joe, I’m always onboard for a bad bitch to get hers and own it. And to see that persona in the form of Judy Greer just made me so happy. Like you, I’ve been a fan of hers for years. In particular, I fell in love with her somewhere between Kitty in Arrested Development and Cheryl in Archer. This might be a weird connection, but I was thinking about her descent into madness at the same time I was (still) contemplating Shirley, another movie about female rage and madness.

In the latter film, there two lines in particular: “The world’s too cruel to girls,” followed by: “What happens to lost girls? They go mad.” While I don’t think there was a big thematic message going on in “Good Boy,” I did see a similarity in the way the two films are structured around loss and, in a way, gaslighting. No one believes that Maggie’s dog is some monstrous entity. Hell, even as the bodies pile up, Reuben engages in a little gaslighting himself: he only appears as the monstrous thing when he’s ready to kill or when they’re alone. Even the predictable ending, where Reuben winds up being adopted out to the next unsuspecting victim, shows the endless cycle of abuse and gaslighting that just won’t ever break.

Also: the gore is well done.

....did you like my segue? For what it is, I did like MacIntyre’s staging. I think he, more than some of the directors we’ve seen recently (*cough* “Crawlers” *cough*) understood the limitations he’d be working with and used the gore splats effectively. I do wish we could have seen a bit more of the demonic dog, if only to figure out what kind of monster he was. An alien? Some demonic entity? A corgi? An unexpressed anal gland?

As for a rating, I’m leaning somewhere between 3 and 3.5 “Namaste El Oh Els” out of five.

So what about you? Did you like the direction the narrative went? Did you like what special effects there were? And what’s your final rating?

JOE

As I mentioned, I’m definitely happy that we didn’t wind up with Maggie hallucinating the whole thing in her doctor’s office (Sidebar: what a shameful misuse of Elise Neal! Booooo).

With that said, however, the deaths of both Annie and Nate was mildly surprising - if only because I didn’t think that “Good Boy” had the teeth to kill off two genuinely likeable characters. The fact that Maggie doesn’t get away was also somewhat unexpected. Sure she’s done some terrible things, but it’s a pretty grim finale for a woman who began the episode simply wanting some recognition at work and a family.

So yes, while I’ll confess that Reuben winding back up at the pound and being adopted out to some poor sucker seemed inevitable, what ultimately became of our poor heroine did catch me off guard.

I’ll also agree with you about the FX. Into The Dark is never going to deliver crazy creature effects, but it is a touch disappointing to get a glimpse of (what appears to be) some decent practical effects when Reuben morphs into his true form. Would I have loved a Ginger Snaps-esque creature? Absolutely...but we know the tight restrictions that these episodes are made under (fiscally and time-wise), so a glimpse will have to suffice.

As it is, I still quite liked the less showy bits, particularly how MacIntyre blended the gore with the comedic beats. I’m thinking of when Reuben merely sniffs out the nightvision doggie cam, or even seeing Annie get sucked under the bed, which proceeds to ooze an absolutely incredible amount of blood. These are redefining the genre, but they look good, they get a laugh and they get the job done!

Overall, the mixture of comedy and social comedy about the plight of women struggling for a work/life balance mostly works for me, especially considering the game performance by Judy Greer. I’m giving “Good Boy” the same as you: in the hands of a lesser actress it’s probably more a 3/5, but the Greer factor kicks it up to 3.5. More MacIntyre, more Greer and more Neal, please!

Next time: we’re sticking around Gayly Dreadful and checking out Adam Mason’s “They Come Knocking.” Cross your fingers that we like his second entry more than his first, “I’m Just F**king With You”.