Blu-ray Review: Triple Dog

It’s birthday time for young Eve (Alexia Fast), a high school student who is turning sixteen. And so, her mum arranges for several of Eve’s friends (or at least, casual acquaintances) from school to come over and spend the night, slumber party style. Also in attendance at this less-than-gala coming-of-age event is Sarah (Emily Tennant), the conservative Catholic girl; well-to-do Cecily (Janel Parrish); Liza (Scout Taylor-Compton), the “freak” of the bunch who has earned the nickname of “Rat Girl” due to her carrying around a pet rodent; bubbly Nina (Carly McKillip); and lastly, bad girl Chapin (Brittany Robertson), the skater chick of the crowd who decides to liven up the dull party by inviting everyone to play a game called “Triple Dog.”

What is “Triple Dog,” you ask? Is it somewhat akin to “Double Secret Probation?” Or does it involve some sort of kinky lesbian sex sect? Sadly, neither is true. Instead, “Triple Dog” is a game wherein the girls dare each other to do something insane (or at least slightly rash) or risk getting their heads shaved. It also serves as the rather weak plot point of a rather weak film entitled Triple Dog.

Throughout the course of the film (which takes place entirely during one evening, with some flashbacks thrown in revolving around the mysterious death of another student in order to make it “hip” enough for modern audiences) our onscreen heroines go through a series of often-humiliating dares in order to keep their locks intact. The Catholic girl takes a jog around the neighborhood in her own birthday suit (which is, sadly, something you don’t see every day). One girl has to urinate in public (which, sadly, is something you see all too often). Another is picked to steal some porn from a convenience store, and chooses to blow up the shop’s microwave in the process — just to liven things up a bit. Unfortunately, no amount of carelessness depicted by the makers of Triple Dog manage to liven up their film very much.

At its core, Triple Dog is a mediocre flick targeted at teenage vixens who have adopted a horribly contracted version of the English language as their own; girls who are trying to find their place in the world and who are basically afraid of not fitting in with their peers. The characters appear to have been lifted wholesale from previous (read: better) productions, and their dialogue offers little in the way of development. In its defense, however — and I confess I could be completely mistaken on this assumption — the movie does attempt to console its irresolute audience by sending out a heartfelt message of some nature. At least, I think it did. If so, said message was buried under so much head-shaking dialogue and coming-of-age story clichés that it was totally lost.

Or maybe I’m just too old and too male for this movie, one or the other.

Debuting on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA, Triple Dog is presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Having been shot in HD to begin with, Triple Dog makes the transition over to Blu-ray fairly well: the image is very crisp and fresh (with a little fuzz here and there during some of the darker scenes), colors are bright and lifelike, and the detail is about as deep as you can expect for a low-budget film presented on a 25GB disc. Accompanying the main feature is a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, which is mostly front-heavy and comes through well, but which is also very loud compared to most other releases. An English DD 2.0 soundtrack is also included.

Since I found the film itself to be fairly uninteresting, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there were very few extras to wade through. Apart from a few trailers (one of which is for Triple Dog, while the rest are for other Well Go releases), all we get here is six-minutes of deleted scenes. None of these snipped segments succeed in adding any sense of “Oh, they should have left that mutha in!” to the film at all, so it’s easy to see why they made their way to the cutting room floor.

Although, in all honesty, the entire film could have been left on the cutting room floor and I wouldn’t have through twice about it.

In short: skip it.