Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Into the Dark: Good Boy’ on Hulu, in Which Judy Greer Adopts an Adorable Dog with a Dark Side

Hulu and Blumhouse’s horror anthology Into the Dark has unleashed a dog-centric episode (get it? Unleashed?) with Good Boy, because last week was Pet Appreciation Week, and the series’ holiday themes have gotten a little less official. (What’s next? Chocolate Cupcake Day May the Fourth? International Day of Slayer?) Not that we care, since this movie cues up the impeccable Judy Greer as a new dog mom who unwittingly adopts a fluffy-wuffy helldog from Hades.

INTO THE DARK: GOOD BOY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Another lousy date. This time, the guy is 36 and says it’s too soon for him to even consider whether he wants to have children. Maggie (Greer) sighs and deactivates her dating-app account. She’s 39. Tick tock, tick tock is all she hears. She calls the fertility doc and makes an appointment to harvest and freeze her eggs. Before you can shed a sympathetic tear, life piles on: she loses her job as culture editor at the Valley Yeller newspaper, which is going digital. Bad news, she’s now an “independent contractor” for the paper. Worse news, salary and insurance are kaput.

Acting on the advice of her editor-in-chief played by an unrecognizable Steve Guttenberg (I did a double-take when I saw the credits), she decides to get an emotional support dog. See, he’s a passive-aggressive, touchy-feely newspaper editor, which made me snort. Good one! It established Good Boy as a comedy. Anyway, she picks out a calm little snuggler with floofy ears and a black spot on his eye. He’s cute as hell. She names him Reuben because he stole her sandwich. Hey Maggie, the first rule of dog ownership is, NEVER TURN YOUR BACK ON A SANDWICH.

Maggie and Reuben do everything together. She dresses him in little jammies and raincoats; he stops to glance at a cupcake shop, so she gets a job there. It’s love. It’s also disgusting, sure, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. As we wait for the other Milk Bone to drop, Maggie makes a friend in Jen (Mina Joo) and actually has a decent date with nice-guy cop Nate (McKinley Freeman). Soon enough, when someone makes Maggie anxious, her emotional support dog reveals he’s quite the sociopath. The handsy guy on a bad date, the pesky landlady… woe be the person who complains about an unsatisfactorily fluffed layer of cupcake frosting.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Good Boy exists in the magic ethereal space between Cujo and Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

Performance Worth Watching: Show me someone not endeared to Judy Greer, and I’ll show you a lump of decaying corpseflesh. She renders dull one-liners serrated; her stable, nice-lady demeanor always seems one breath away from comic lunacy. Now someone give her an indie dramedy to headline, please.

Memorable Dialogue: When little Reuben gets the other dogs at yoga class riled up, Maggie has this exchange with a rude woman:

“When’s the last time you expressed his anal glands?” the woman snaps.

“When’s the last time you expressed yours?” Maggie retorts.

Sex and Skin: A few moans from a little offscreen woo-ha action.

Our Take: Good Boy is a slight thing made more character-rich by Greer, who perfectly modulates the melancholy at the heart of her character, making what happens to her/by her both wild and sad. But what happens isn’t wild enough to be truly satisfying; its comic situations are obvious, and it often allows the carnage to transpire offscreen, which will surely rile the ire of horrormongers.

Such is the slapdash nature of Into the Dark, which frequently features a good idea within a dashed-off script. The good idea in Good Boy is casting Greer, who’s a delight, and makes this outing one of the series’ best in a so-far rocky 2020 season. Without her ability to mine empathy and laughs from a thin screenplay, this would be another dud. (P.S. Yes, that’s a Pooka chew toy in little Reuben’s bed, an Easter egg for serial Into the Dark dorks.)

Our Call: STREAM IT. There are far worse things to watch than Judy Greer slowly unscrewing the lid on her character’s sanity for 90 minutes.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Into the Dark: Good Boy on Hulu