Cinema tends to paint the relationship between man and his best friend as wholly good, clean, and sweet. One of the earliest films, 1905’s Rescued By Rover, helped establish dogs as reliable, wonderful heroes. We’ve had classics like Old Yeller and Lassie, and there’s been a bevy of saccharine dog movies in the last decade alone: A Dog’s Purpose (2017), A Dog’s Journey (2019), A Dog’s Way Home (2019), The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019), and the simply titled Dog (2022), among others. These treat dogs with a bizarre reverence, as if these four-legged creatures are flawless, all-knowing, all-seeing deities.
Yes, dogs are wonderful—but they’re also really gross. Dogs love to lick their own genitals and then your face. They’ll eat their own vomit and their own feces; there’s really nothing they won’t eat, regurgitate, and then eat again. They’re often more wonky than upright. Dogs are, in short, freaking weird, but most films starring them don’t seem willing to admit that.
Enter Strays, the year’s raunchiest comedy about a group of dogs who band together to rip a guy’s dick off. What Strays manages in a flurry of nasty, disgusting jokes and visual gags is something no other dog movie has: a realistic understanding of these wacky, filthy animals. The film packs a stunning amount of gross-out humor into a mere 93 minutes, and in doing so, it reveals a shocking, subversive, and exceptionally well-rounded portrait of man’s best friend.
(Warning: Spoilers for Strays ahead.)
One of the funniest scenes in Strays doesn’t just lovingly poke fun at how silly dogs are—it also darkly subverts the typically reverent dog movie genre. Pup Reggie (Will Ferrell) and fellow doggie pals Bug (Jamie Foxx), Maggie (Isla Fisher), and Hunter (Randall Park) find themselves at a carnival on the way to tear off some genitals. It’s there that they find a strange dog staring at a couple. This is Narrator Dog (Josh Gad), who observes his owner from a distance. He makes insightful observations about his human, James, a man who’s flirting with a woman over a carnival game; Narrator Dog lets us know that James is hoping to win her affection.
“Nobody can hear you!” Bug shouts at him, highlighting the nonsense of an all-knowing Narrator Dog. It’s a pointed dig at films like A Dog’s Purpose and A Dog’s Journey, both of which are narrated by a dog voiced by—you guessed it—Josh Gad. But things get even darker, as Narrator Dog actually agrees with Bug about the pointlessness of his existence, fully aware that no human can understand him. He then shares a shocking fact: “I’m the only one who knows James is a cold-blooded serial killer.” Narrator Dog notes that James’ body count is steadily increasing, and nobody but the dog has any idea. It’s both a hysterical deconstruction of the dog films we’ve come to adore/endure, as well as a wickedly funny and unexpected joke about the wild kinds of things dogs see us do, when we think they don’t notice.
Another facet of the dog experience that most movies skirt around is even more obvious: Loving dogs comes with an acceptance that you’re going to deal with a lot of shit—literally. Every day, picking up dog poop is a part of a dog owner’s routine. You use a bag, of course, but it’s still pretty gnarly. Strays dives into this head-on, delivering an unforgettably grim prison break sequence.
Reggie and company have all found themselves staring down a major roadblock on their ball-biting plans: They’ve been locked up in the pound. After a botched attempt to get the keys using Hunter’s enormous penis (if you’ve never looked closely at a dog’s penis before, keep it that way), Reggie and company rally the other dozen or so dogs locked up to devise a plan to escape. He gives a rousing speech to the group of dogs that their lives are far from over, and they are then determined to follow Reggie and get their freedom back.
The key to their escape lies in the first line of the scene’s accompanying needle drop: “Oh shit!” As Fergie’s “London Bridge” blares, a series of close-ups on these sweet beautiful pups tells us everything we need to know: They’re about to start shitting. But this doesn’t end with a few cute faces. Instead, we see every dog in the pen take a dump. Little dogs taking big dumps, big dogs taking tiny dumps, and everything in between—it’s all here. As the song's chants of “Oh shit” continue, poop flies left and right. There’s even an extreme close-up of a super-tiny little doggy angel, quickly interrupted by the dog projectile-shitting all over the wall behind them. The Exorcist wishes it could conjure up a jump scare like that.
The unbearable smell drives the guard (Brett Gelman) to the cell, only to find the dogs in perfectly neat rows, all very proudly standing next to their poops. Of course, moments later, he slips on the shit and gets covered in it, allowing the dogs to run out of the cell (and over him) toward freedom. It’s completely and utterly vile—but also tremendously refreshing to see Strays refuse to shy away from a fact of life, joyously playing up the fact that dogs poop. Yeah, it’s simple, but that didn’t stop the convulsions of laughter and tears running down my face.
That’s not even the film’s most shocking, gross-out scene—the one that really highlights what dogs are like when they go feral. After consuming wild mushrooms, the group begins to hallucinate. It’s a moment that allows for some particularly absurd humor, reminiscent of director Josh Greenbaum’s previous film, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. As it plays with style and form—using hand-drawn animation, puppets, and more—Strays amplifies the overwhelming silliness of dogs as they zoom around without a care in the world.
Then, Maggie, using her excellent sniffing skills, uncovers something enticing, pulling out an adorable fuzzy toy from a rabbit hole. As dogs tend to do, Maggie tears the toy to shreds, gleefully obliterating it to cheery music and the sounds of childish laughter from her friends. Bug, Reggie, and Hunter all find toys in the rabbit hole of their own, and tear through them with reckless abandon.
It’s an extremely funny and extremely uncomfortable moment. We know that these good boys (and girl) are hallucinating, so the odds that these are actually toys they’re ripping apart is small. And when reality sets in, we see the truth of what they’ve done: the dogs have slaughtered a family of rabbits. Like a crime scene, guts, gore, and blood are strewn all over the forest as we see the bits of what’s left of these little bunnies. The dogs do what they do best and bury the rabbits, though the truth of what they’ve done won’t be leaving them anytime soon. It’s a vital reminder that dogs are not, in fact, the angelic little babies we sometimes treat them as—all while being outrageously funny and totally outlandish.
Dogs are far from perfect saints prepared to guide us on our own existential journeys—but despite the dirt and grime and poop, we all still love them so much. Finally, a movie has come along that gets it—and that movie is Strays.
