Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Toby McTeague - 1986

I went ahead and put on the dog racing movie I referred to on the last blog entry.  I meant to put this on at a time when I was in a "I don't fucking care" type of mood.  Because realistically, this is the kind of movie where you won't care.

Toby McTeague is a movie and a character in the movie.  He is a teenager, living in like Alaska or North Canada or Antarctica or some place like that.  One of those snow covered, wintery places where people live in log cabins and things happen.

When I was a kid, we owned the movie Iron Will.  Iron Will was some VHS gifted to us by some random ass person.  Iron Will was a dog racing movie, about a dude named Will who enters a dog race and it's brutal and crazy and eventually he somehow wins.  It was somewhat dark though, for sure a little offbeat and under the radar.  This movie, Toby McTeague was like Iron Will without those dark qualities.

Toby's dad is a dog racing champ and single father of two boys.  All they have is the dogs and the sleds, and when father and Toby get in a argument that results in Toby leaving the home, father comes to the rescue and ends up crashing a plane (...oh, uh, I guess they had a plane too) during his landing.  Father is hurt and so that means he's out of the race.  But the race pays $6000 and that could perhaps just be enough to save the family. Could Toby do it?

That's actually the plot up to the hour mark, or maybe even after.  It's all what you expect, straight forward as hell.  I thought the strangest thing about it was probably where it was filmed, I'm guessing Canada, but I don't really know.  (It was Canada, that's two points for me)  Whatever, it's irrelevant, the movie is extremely easy to guess what'll happen and it's your average 1, 1.5 star experience.

One minute of research shows me that Iron Will and Toby McTeague share a writer!  No wonder it reminded me of Iron Will.  Djordje Milicevic wrote on both movies.

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