Most men of my generation were (and to a certain extent still are) in love with Kim Richards. We grew up with her in the Witch Mountain movies, her made for TV films, TV show guest spots, and her short lived TV series as one of McClean Stevenson’s daughters on Hello Larry. So when I saw that Shriek Show had released a two disc set of Devil Dog: Hound of Hell (1979) I just had to snap it up for a look see.
The movie was one of those grade B horror flicks made for TV back when movies made specifically for TV was a staple of network programming. The plot is a major slice of pure seventies cheese, about a German Shepard that just happens to be the son of Satan and his attempts to convert a typical Christian family over to EVIL while patriarch Richard Crenna desperately tries to save them from the dog and the cult that instigated the whole thing, with a few Omen inspired deaths and a mano a canino showdown thrown in for good measure.
I remember being scared spitless watching this as a twelve-year-old back in the day, but seeing it now with the for then state of the art chromokey special effects and the over the top acting to make things seem more spooky than they really are is more laughable than anything else. But the real reason for seeing this DVD is for the second disc with the special features, specifically the featurette To the Devil, a Dog, a close to feature length interview with producer Jerry Zeitman and former child actors Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards, who are both still active in the industry.
The interviews are three separate ones conducted at their homes and Eisenmann gets the short end of the stick with about only twenty minutes to talk about the film and his career (his biggest amount of fan mail is still for his bit part in a Star Trek movie). Zeitman gets too much time spending over forty minutes meandering on about the projects he is currently working on, one of which is a possible big budget feature version of Devil Dog (yikes!). Luckily Richards gets the lion’s share of time as she entertainingly tells behind the scenes anecdotes about making Devil Dog, the Witch Mountain films, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), The Car (1977), Meatballs II (1984), Tuff Turf (1985), and her return to film after more than fifteen years of being a soccer mom as Christina Ricci’s mom in Black Snake Moan (2006), which unbelievably for her fans garnered no publicity at all.
