Team Small Dog Summer Movie Review - Rise of the Planet of the Small Apelike Dogs.

I suggest finding a bootleg copy of this with subtitles in Cyrillic and watching it under the influence of dental surgery anesthesia and painkillers.

So James Franco is this animal testing performance artist residing in a leafy suburb of San Francisco. Let's say it's Santa Cruz. More bong hits per capita there than all other leafy suburbs combined. He raises 3 small dogs he finds on various other leafy suburban streets and every morning happily marches through the PETA blockades to his day job animal testing chimps at a drug manufacturing facility.

All his small dogs have weird issues. One has alzheimers and is going blind and deaf and sometimes hurts her back and is afraid of flies. One has a weird liver issue which causes him to do stuff like have seizures or start barking at his plastic dog bone outside for like an hour if no one will get their ass up off the couch to go show him that it's actually just his plastic dog bone. And one of them is so mean the circus abandoned her on the side of the road but luckily for this movie plot, not until after teaching her sign language and having her assassinate Charlton Heston.

So James Franco totally makes this rad drug that is like super rad. Dude.Then he forgets what it does. Luckily, his dad is John Lithgow who used to play an alien dad on 3rd Rock From the Sun. Have I mentioned before that James Franco was in my digital media class once at CalArts summer school and totally fell asleep in class like, at least probably every day? Dude. So anyways, he injects the talking dog with ALZ-112, not having any idea that it's going to give her the ability to use tools like apes.

When James Franco isn't trying out experimental drugs on his pets, he enjoys taking his dogs hiking in the redwoods, sometimes even off leash. And then there is this whole total bummer thing when one of the dogs gets out and tries to drive a car. Turns out the poor dog thinks he is sitting in his hallway looking at the wallpaper, but he actually has this weird liver disease that makes him disoriented and he's out driving the neighbor's car around the block. So all the dogs are impounded because you know what is illegal? Disoriented dogs driving around a neighborhood. That and keeping monkeys in a leafy suburb.

The dogs are impounded and absconded away to the secret animal control center of Santa Cruz. You think the razor wire and security gates are to keep PETA out, but when you go in, you see that the dogs and monkeys are all kept in cages in the secret underground tunnel. You can check out any time you like, but, you can never leave. Sure, it has a beautiful antique atrium tower, but that's just for show. Cesar Milan is the hero of the armed guards there, and because the economy sucks there are only 3 of them-the corpse of Dennis Hopper, his half wit son, and this guy from Harry Potter movies.

The armed guards obviously didn't sign up for any Susan Garrett webinars, or even watch any of her videos. Crate games, fooey. They are so old skool and are always chasing down the prisoner dogs with tasers. Shock collars galore. Turned up higher than 3. Turned up to 11! James Franco is like totally trying to get his dogs back, but then it's like totally hard. So he goes home and has a nap.

Luckily the infected small dog, with her supersonic understanding of the power of the cookie, and using her newly developed opposable thumb, clicker trains the entire underground cavern of enslaved, chihuahuas to do Michael Jackson's Thriller Dance using Chips Ahoys. They use this to distract the guards and escape through the atrium tower.

Spoiler Alert!
In the climactic ending, the small dog army grapevines and pada berets their way over Highway 17, onto the Golden Gate Bridge, and frees millions of small, apelike little dogs. Not all of them can do the Thriller dance, but they just shuffle along anyways. PETA representatives appear jubilant at first, but then retract all official statements after little dogs are seen plummeting off of bridges and getting hit in traffic on the freeway. James Franco is nowhere to be found, because he's moved to New York and started doing art projects with Carter. There is a closing shot of him gazing lovingly at the Statue of Liberty, murmuring, Viva La Revolucion. Sequel, anyone?