Oh! Heavenly Dog

Oh! Heavenly Dog (1980)

An adult tail of murder, mystery, and forbidden love.

Browning is a PI with a bad cold, who's sent to investigate a case by a mysterious client. He stumbles across the body of a young woman and is stabbed to death, and when he wakes up in heaven, they tell him he's "marginal material," and they can only decide on his final destination through one last assignment: to go back and solve his own murder. As a dog. A cute fluffy little dog (Benji). Undaunted, Browning begins to investigate the case as best he can around his canine disabilities (dialing the phone presents a special challenge) to solve the murders, save the girl, and see justice done.

Date of release
1980-07-11
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (77)
Runtime
1h 43m
Genres
Comedy, Crime, Fantasy
Director
Joe Camp

Casting

Interesting facts

Oh! Heavenly Dog is a 1980 American fantasy comedy film written by Rod Browning and directed by Joe Camp, their third collaboration in films featuring the dog Benji and stars Chevy Chase as a private investigator who is reincarnated as a dog to solve his own murder. Jane Seymour and Omar Sharif co-star in the film, released by 20th Century-Fox. The screenplay was based loosely on the 1951 film You Never Can Tell starring Dick Powell.

Production

Chase later said Camp "came to me with a script that I thought was very funny. I said yes, did it and left after six weeks." The featured dog is Benjean, billed here as Benji. She was the daughter of the dog Higgins who originated the character Benji.

The film was shot in London, Paris and Montreal. Because of England's quarantine laws – which required dogs to be in quarantine for six months – the scenes with Benji were shot in Montreal's old city.

Chase says after he left Camp "shot the rest of the scenes with the dog and changed all the lines. I had to come back, go onto the looping stage and loop completely different dialogue than I had read in the script. It was very infuriating; I was so upset that to this day I have never actually seen the movie."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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