10 Things I Learned While Watching: Turner and Hooch
1. The Plot: Tom Hanks is the sort of cop who owns a pants pressing machine and keeps a Dust Buster in his car. Hooch is the sort of dog that acts as the perfect example of why I fucking love cats. In the beginning they sorta hate each other but after Hooch turns out to be the only eyewitness to a murder, Hanks and the dog are forced to team up to catch the killer before he either does or does not kill again.
2. It’s Starsky and Hutch, without the Starsky. This movie is just one long pile of Hutch.
3. T and H has the same sort of moody jazz 80’s horn soundtrack that Lethal Weapon has. What it doesn’t have is a cool Lethal catch phrase like “I’m getting too old for this shit”. It has Hooch’s gimmick of dangling huge globs of pre-cum from his mouth while sitting quietly in the passenger seat of the car instead.
4. If I was stranded on a desert island and throughout the entire duration of this stranding could only watch one movie starring a human being and an animal, that movie wouldn’t be Turner and Hooch. It’d be whatever-it’s-called. The one where Bill Murray inherits an elephant and takes in on a cross country road trip the end of which Bill Murray chooses the circus of love over cash.
5. Either the Bill Murray/elephant flick, or Smokey and the Bandit 2.
6. Watching Turner and Hooch at 3 a.m. this morning was a lot like watching the unraveling of my own marriage with Helen. I’m having a hard time figuring out which one of us was Tom Hanks though, and which one of us was the Hooch. We seem to switch characters, Helen and me, depending upon the particular scene.
7. At one point Helen’s the one with the can of Lysol up her ass and I’m the slobbering lunatic living moment to moment and in need of a bath. The next minute I’m Tom Hanks standing there with a face carved in pure bafflement and 100% horror watching as Helen stampedes around what was once our little life together, destroying everything her wet jowl-ed love for me had ever owned.
8. T and H may be harmless fun, but for Hollywood Studios Turner and Hooch was a gateway drug to more destructive/infinitely shit-y type buddy cop/dog movies like K9, K9 P.I., and Scoot and Kassie’s Christmas Adventure.
9. Historical Note: Scoot’s pal (aka Luke Perry) wasn’t officially a cop in that Christmas movie, but they did go up against some professional ‘crooks’, so it counts goddamn it. It counts.
10. More about elephants: The last time I was at a Yawpers show I was hanging around outside for a minute using a mailbox as a table because the bouncers who were standing outside the bar carding the door where saying the goddamn most cliché/goofball things that I had to write at least some of it down. They were mostly saying hi-five stuff like “I don’t need to tell you there’s a smoking hot redhead inside” and “She cries too easy” and “You take a girl with a sleeve and a shaved head on the side and I’m done”. They were saying this stuff and then suddenly they were talking about elephants. “Best animal attack story every,” one bouncer said to the other. “He was standing next to this elephant…..” Long story short, it wasn’t actually the best animal attack story ever. It was a depressing animal story when you really thought about it. And I thought about it. And then I thought about my own depressing animal story. And then a few months later I sat down to write this thing about this depressing animal story, because I had totally fucking forgotten that: Hooch dies in the end.
Multiverse Johnson 