A Dog's Breakfast

If your idea of a hilarious good time is a completely repulsive character engaging in narcissistic behaviour before being tormented by guilt for extended periods of time, then your ship just came in. A Dog’s Breakfast offers the least likely hero that a comedy has ever had and winds up seeming less funny than excruciating. David Hewlett stars as Patrick, an obsessive loner who lives in his dead parents’ house, minus the furniture he sold on the internet. He’s distressed to discover that his lovely sister Marilyn (Kate Hewlett) is marrying a fake-tanned TV star named Ryan (Paul McGillion) and even more distressed to find that she’s brought her beau to visit. Convinced that Ryan is going to kill Marilyn, our man accidentally winds up killing Ryan instead and then has to figure out ways to hide this little boo-boo from his increasingly irate sister. I get that the movie’s trying to satirise Patrick’s point of view but they don’t even make him endearingly geeky. He’s just a selfish pest, so much so that you wonder why his sister would bother dealing with him in the first place. He’s also such a specific case that you can’t really get much out of his unpleasantness; it’s like being trapped in a stuck elevator with your worst enemy. Throw in a Scooby-Doo cop-out ending and you’ve got a recipe for disappointment like no other. Extras centre on the cast and crew, borrowed from Stargate:SG1. A commentary with writer/director Hewlett, various crew members and his mother is quite genial and reasonably informative, as is the four-part "making of” doc that features Hewlett cracking wise while giving full props to his many collaborators. Eight deleted scenes, including a couple of bits from the fake series starring Ryan, round things out.