Reggie loves his master, Doug. In fact, the feeling is mutual!
Reggie sure does miss his owner’s girlfriend, though. She has been gone ever since the dog found a hidden pair of panties and brought them for her to see. She really was sweet to him, too. I wonder why she left?
So now it’s just him and Doug. The two love to play games, like when Doug leaves Reggie in a hot car, and Reggie has to see how long he can go without passing out. And lately, Doug and Reggie have been playing this new game, where Doug drives really far away from home, throws a ball for Reggie to get and quickly returns home without him. And it’s Reggie’s job to get the ball and find his way back home!
“Sure, Doug really challenges me with this game,” Reggie tells himself. “But that’s because he believes in me!”
That’s probably why Doug takes him a three-hour drive away into the city, much farther than they’ve ever gone before. And this time … well … getting home is a bit harder.
Fortunately, another stray named Bug, takes Reggie under his, um, paw, and introduces Reggie to his other dog friends, Maggie and Hunter. After hearing Reggie’s story, Bug knows the truth: Doug isn’t playing a game. He’s trying to abandon Reggie.
And when Reggie admits that hard truth, he’s upset. But with the help of his newfound friends, Reggie’s going to finish this game of fetch—one last time.
But Reggie isn’t going back to Doug to return the tennis ball. He’s going back to exact revenge.
Very, very personal revenge.
Bug becomes something like an adoptive big brother when he realizes that Reggie has been abandoned. Reggie, Bug, Maggie and Hunter slowly become family to one another. Reggie eventually realizes the problem wasn’t that he was a bad dog, but that his owner was a bad man.
Obviously, Reggie’s revenge plot isn’t a good thing. But the film does paint people who abandon animals as being bad.
Reggie frequently references the “devil in the sky,” which we learn is his way of describing a billboard with a mailman on it. Likewise, one dog says that “humping is the devil’s dance.” The dogs cannot understand an electric fence, and one tells the others to “not test the dark arts.” Someone swears an oath of sorts, saying, “Paw to God.”
After wondering if anyone saw them steal food, fireworks go off, prompting Hunter to panic and scream, “God saw! God sees everything!” After the dogs bury a group of dead bunnies (more on that below), Hunter leads the group in a funeral prayer.
We’re told that Doug’s favorite toy is his male anatomy, which is why Reggie crudely hopes and plans to bite it off in revenge. Doug masturbates to porn (though we don’t see anything critical). Verbal references frequently remind viewers of how much Doug engages in that behavior. At one point, the dog attempts to play with Doug while he’s masturbating.
We see Doug’s naked rear. It’s implied that the man shaves his pubic hair. In a hallucination (more on that below), Reggie sees Doug shaving that area (and we get a glimpse of a massive pile of pubic hair next to him). The hair then turns into a tornado and whisks Doug away. We also see Doug scratching his crotch under his pants.
Doug has a poster of a woman in a tiny bikini on his wall, and we later see that he’s got a cardboard box that’s labeled as “Doug’s Porn.” Hanging off the rear of Doug’s car is an accessory that makes the car look as if it has male genitalia, and his license plate spells out something that calls attention to it. Furthermore, Reggie wears a bandana as a collar, which Reggie later reveals is a rag he’s used in grossly personal manner.
Furthermore, a man paints a naked portrait of himself with its rear visible, and he comments that his father is going to love the painting. Three teenagers (two guys and one girl) try to light a firework at a carnival; when it fails to go off, one of the guys asks the other two if they want to kiss instead.
The film also has many, many jokes about dog genitals and sex. In one scene, the dogs are stuck in a dog pound, and they come up with a plan to use Hunter’s aroused anatomy to try to grab the cell door keys. To enact this plan, Maggie has to arouse him by graphically describing the two of them having sex, and we see Hunter’s dog erection onscreen. It’s a source of more conversation later on.
The camera repeatedly zooms in on various dogs’ reproductive anatomies. Bug comments on the sexual tension between Hunter and Maggie. Hunter and Maggie compliment each other’s genitals.
The dogs play a game of “Never Have I Ever,” in which Maggie confesses that she had sex with another female dog during her “experimental years” when she was two years old. They also talk about how people have sex and refer to doing it “doggy style.” While falling down a tree, Reggie discovers a trio of squirrels having a threesome. Bug admits to having sex with a raccoon.
We see the dogs going through mating motions with various items—in fact, Bug tells Reggie that one of the rules of being a stray is that he can “hump whatever you want.” Bug frequently references a couch that he has a thing for, and we later see him have sex with another couch. Reggie does the same with a garden gnome that he believes to be his son, and he asks if anyone else wants “to hump my son.” (Reggie later tells Doug that he and his son had sex.) A couple female dogs are prostitutes, and they ask if Reggie has ever been with their breed of dog before. Hunter and Maggie have sex, too.
Reggie holds a pair of panties in his mouth which leads to Doug’s girlfriend discovering that Doug is cheating on her. Many dogs (and in particular, Bug) make plenty of references to biting genitals and other extremely graphic and crude anatomical phrases.
After eating mushrooms, the strays hallucinate that they’re playing with a stuffed bunny toy. When they wake up, however, they discover that they’ve torn apart a family of rabbits. We see lots of bloody limbs, decapitated rabbit heads and bits of fur scattered about.
Bug gets snatched up by a bird of prey, and after Reggie saves him, the two fall back to the ground, hitting nearly every branch of a large tree on the way down. We learn that Hunter intentionally has hurt himself in the past as a way to keep his cone on. One dog briefly mentions that his owner is a bloodthirsty serial killer who has so far killed three people.
[Spoiler Warning] The dogs do, in fact, manage to make it back to Doug, and Doug attempts to kill Reggie and the gang using a wooden baseball bat. Ultimately, he only succeeds in breaking many items in his home and hurting himself before he falls to the ground. The other dogs hold Doug down as Reggie bites off Doug’s clothed penis; while we don’t actually see his genitals, we do see a large blood stain seeping through Doug’s sweatpants. We’re later informed that the doctors were unable to reattach it. Additionally, the fight also burns Doug’s home down.
Strays is the most vulgar movie I’ve seen in a long time. There’s a lot of profanity here, enough that my tallies should probably be considered rough estimates.
The f-word is used at least 180 times, including about 15 instances that are preceded by “mother.” The s-word is heard 80 times. We hear “a–” nearly 20 times, “b–ch” more 15 times, “d-ck” more than 30 times and “h—” five times. We also hear other crude anatomical slang. There are a couple uses of “d–n” and “p-ss,” as well as a crude hand gesture.
God’s name is used in vain more than 30 times, and at least 11 of those instances are paired with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is used in vain twice.
A dog is derogatorily called “Adolf” because he’s a German Shepherd.
Doug frequently smokes a bong to get high. People drink beer, and we see some beer bottles and cans littered outside on the ground. Doug is likewise seen intoxicated.
Reggie and his friends drink beer from trash bags and comment on how they like the way the “funny water” makes them feel. They’re later seen intoxicated.
As mentioned above, they also stumble across some mushrooms in the forest; after eating them, they hallucinate. When Reggie walks through an alley, he comments on the fact that there are “so many needles” lying around.
A dog vomits, and another dog eats it onscreen.
To escape the pound, Reggie convinces all the dogs to defecate at the same time to force the “guard” to come in and clean it up, and we see dozens of different splotches on the ground. When the man comes in, he slips on one piece and falls into all the others; he later emerges covered in brown stains. Reggie also steps on some feces. We watch a woman pick up after her dog, and Bug theorizes that the humans must use dog feces to make chocolate.
Many jokes and scenes involve dogs urinating. At one point, Reggie asks the pack if they can all pee on each other so that they can claim each other as their own. The dogs agree, providing us with a long scene in which they all talk with one another as they’re being urinated upon onscreen.
Reggie mentions how Doug would leave him in a hot car many times nearly to the point of passing out. Bug (who is played by a Black actor) talks about how he finds people, but especially white people, weird.
Reggie may be Homeward Bound, but make no mistake: His thoughts are as unfiltered as they come. In fact, he’s likely to tell you that he thinks Air Bud is slang for marijuana.
Strays takes the beloved children’s genre of talking pets and asks one question: What if we made this as crude as possible? It seems that the film believes that the more references to sex, violence and drugs you have, the funnier it must inherently be.
But I’ll be honest, I’m just not the target demographic for an hour and a half of jokes about dog sex. Anyone who buys a ticket for his R-rated canine swear-fest will likewise need to be ready to be sprayed with a firehose of profanities. Cumulatively, the f-words and s-words alone add up to at least 260 instances. That’s nearly three every minute in this 93-minute film—and that doesn’t even count any of the other vulgarities.
Sure, Strays has a few funny jokes about dog behavior that don’t rely on references to genitals, poop or drugs. But the vast majority of gags here made me wonder whether our entertainment is actually progressing towards Idiocracy.
Bad dog, Strays, bad dog.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
