Director : George Alex
Cast : Gabriellle Stone , Jennifer Andrew
Like Inglorious Basterds (And others of its ilk), director Cam Clark’s The Stray decides to rewrite our history into a bit more of a fun genre playground. The film plays with the notion of something like the Cuban-Missile Crisis or another nuclear scare of the 1950s and 1960s actually came to fruition and laid America dead in its wake. And of course with the nuclear fallout, we’re either left with one of two things; giant radiation birthed bug-monsters or the living dead. One of the fun aspects of tacking the revisionist history genre is that once you’ve changed things, anything goes, and historical accuracy no longer needs to be adhered to.
Flashbacks show how this dog just showed up back, in answer to the prayers of the Davis kids, as they live in California. It’s 1991, and Mitch (Michael Cassidy) is a script reader for a movie studio. They’ve sold their home in Colorado, paid to get him into USC’s film school, and all he has to show for it is a studio job that demands 20 hours a day of reading, writing “coverage” of scripts and being a “yes man” at the meetings.’
The only funny things Mitch gets to say in the picture are mixed with his endless, interrupting phone calls with colleagues — “It’s ‘Gilligan’s Island on Mars!'” “I don’t think anyone will BELIEVE Julia Roberts is a prostitute.
The Stray doesn’t harp on that. Its setting is merely a backdrop for the story and gives the writers and director an out to avoid having to over complicate the story with technological advancements of the modern day. Its a smart angle that helps keep the nit picky viewer at bay. Instead, the focus of the story is on character relations; the story of a man collapsing two family units due to his refusal to leave his own biological ties behind. Like zombie films that “get it”, The Stray isn’t about the flesh eaters, its about the people who are keeping away from them and the conflicts within their own survival units. As told in present and flashback, the film really builds upon its own depth, understanding and mythology in just the amount of time for one feature length film.