"Sleeping Dogs" is a black comedy about relationships and families. Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton) gets engaged to John (Bryce Johnson) and in the spirit of honesty - spurred on by her mother and a co-worker, neither of whom know the details of her secret - tells him of a teenage sexual indiscretion. The film then deals with the fallout of John's inability to deal with Amy's past.
What starts out as a comedy gets progressively darker; the laughs are slowly replaced with smiles and soon even they are a thing of the past. The film was overly long - it could have been covered in half the time just as effectively - and as it progressed I started being distracted by Goldthwaite's direction which, once the laughs had dried up, had a day-time soap 'quality' to it. Hamilton is engaging and sympathetic as Amy; had her performance been weak, the film would have been unbearable as she is in nearly every scene. However, the performance that lingers in the memory is Brian Posehn as the stoner Randy, who has some really nice lines including a bit about monkeys and midgets.
Moral of the film: Don't tell anybody about your teenage sexual experiments if they involved pets!
What starts out as a comedy gets progressively darker; the laughs are slowly replaced with smiles and soon even they are a thing of the past. The film was overly long - it could have been covered in half the time just as effectively - and as it progressed I started being distracted by Goldthwaite's direction which, once the laughs had dried up, had a day-time soap 'quality' to it. Hamilton is engaging and sympathetic as Amy; had her performance been weak, the film would have been unbearable as she is in nearly every scene. However, the performance that lingers in the memory is Brian Posehn as the stoner Randy, who has some really nice lines including a bit about monkeys and midgets.
Moral of the film: Don't tell anybody about your teenage sexual experiments if they involved pets!
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