Product: Shiloh [VHS] (1997)
Rating: 1.0
Expectations
This is a story of a boy who goes for a walk one day through his West Virginia town and a beagle, Shiloh, follows him home. The boy, Marty Preston, discovers that the dog has an abusive owner. The boy's own family is very poor and can not afford a pet; also, his father is a firm believer that, abused or not, the dog has an owner and he must be returned. They give the dog back but Shiloh escapes again, and when he turns up outside the Preston home, Marty hides him up a hill behind their house. If you've never read the novel by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, I suppose you might like this movie; however, I'm a fan of the book and I've read it a few times with my language arts classes, and in comparison, the movie is terrible. The family does not appear to be poor, an integral part of the story, and the main character, Marty, is often disrespectful, something he never is in the book. Both of these aspects are important to the story, because they help you to understand why the family can not keep a dog, why Marty has some difficulty in standing up for himself, etc. And then there's the ending: horrible! The novel has a complex, beautiful ending, one in which you begin to understand the mean dog owner, Judd, and why he is abusive. He and the main character's hostile relationship evolves into something almost like friendship, and it is so well written, it is believable. In the movie, instead of us seeing that, we see instead what some idiot director must have thought of as a more suspenseful ending. If you truly want a family treat, read the novel aloud to your kids!