The Pet (2006)

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The acting in this movie is really good.

A movie about power exchange featuring bondage. Doomed from even before the word go, because nobody here knows what they are doing. The theme has crossed wires, the script is utterly lame, the acting is dull, the camera-work is bleak, the excitement is often off, and the performances are way under par. This thing is too tame to be an adult movie, yet its theme is highly controversial, guaranteed to upset everybody. So, to make it mainstream acceptable, director D. Stevens, who should never work in this town again as he just waists everybody's time, pulls back on the camera-work and makes it as visually appealing as close-circuit television, with images that are often static, frequently distant, or otherwise bland. The human body is, to put it mildly, very interesting. Mr. D. manages brilliantly to make nudity seem boring, for the most part anyway, although I absolutely love that bit "The Girls of The Pet" included as a filler at the end of the plodding main feature, where we get to see under-employed co-star Jane Steele do the Jane Seymour thing with her long, long red hair.The theme also gets entangled with bad guy organ harvesters, as if the bondage BDSM set is the same, or at least, related thing. Does that community a disservice.And those tiresome references likening her to a dog! Playing fetch, yapping, sniffing master's hand. Hell, nobody would regress to animal status overnight. The petting of the hair is real cute though.It also subscribes to the Neanderthal notion that masters want their slaves/pets marked, their charges to crawl around on their knees, and to lick their shoes. I guess this might be prevalent on the real-life scene, appealing to those who are too dumb to think up better fantasies for themselves, but the lead character seemed to be a more refined intelligent type... Anyway, you would have to be very stupid, very dense indeed, to mess up your 'property' so oafishly. I mean, you pay a fortune, and immediately mess up your investment? Hey, would these masters buy a sports car and then drive it through the swamps?Andrea Edmondson gamely tries. Hell, some story she could one day tell to her grandchildren (not).Even with copious nudity, what goes on on- screen, is just about as dull as ditch-water and as tepid as last week's stale tea. An anemic production that's one big yawn.The DVD's stylish box cover art showing the naked bound slave kneeling before her master, is the best thing about it. It is not the image shown here on IMDb, of course not. It is not even really part of the movie, it is obviously a borrowed image Breaking Glass obtained to make the packaging ultra-appealing, and lure in suckers like me. :(To sum it up, the Master/slave genre might be coming into its own with FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, no doubt what motivated Breaking Glass to acquire the rights to this little bit of flotsam, quick to get onto the bandwagon. This one is unsalvagable junk, though, an example of what not to do. Tame, so as not to catch too much flak, bland, because of misdirection and utter incompetence - and worst of all, dumb to the core, as thick as three short planks.

I read about this movie on some shady blog and came here to read reviews. I should've listened... but instead I spent 84 minutes watching this "movie." Not worth it. After the first 10 minutes I was already in deep shock and it was only worse later on. Story was coherent... up to certain point, because later it was confusing and simply terrible. Is it truthful? No. Is it believable? Absolutely not. Are the actors believable? Never. Is it distasteful? Yes. Does the movie have a message in it? Well... it has potential to have a message and to teach us something, but either you're showing the "true" face of BDSM, or you're fighting human trafficking. Don't do both in the same movie. If they really spent a million dollars on this movie, they need to go back to elementary school.

The movie The Pet has an intriguing premise, but it fails in some important ways. They have a terrific young actress in Barbara Edmondson who delivers just the right amount of innocence and pluck. She was very good. Her character gets off to a good start, but unwinds as the story progresses. She just doesn't get enough to say, especially later in the movie when we most want to hear her. The end left me flat.The story was about a pet, the complications that arose were interesting, even tense at times, but we lose sight of our heroine, and the conversation lines were often too weak. I felt like the writers lost sight of what they wanted to do; some serious outside input for later scenes would have made this a great story.They could have done more with this story; they certainly had the right actress for it. I'd recommend the movie just to watch her; not for the nudity but for her interesting delivery.

(Leaving aside the awful, wooden acting, the incoherent plot and the plodding script.)The production company attempted to hype this on BDSM web boards and forums as being a "lifestyle movie", whilst on their website claiming that it was an Important Film dealing with the modern day scandal of human trafficking. Trying to ride those two horses is evident by their mixing up of the trappings of consensual BDSM with modern people smuggling and human organ trading. As such, they smear BDSM while providing a totally unconvincing picture of modern day slavery. If the audience were to be persuaded of anything by this effort, it's the distortion that consensual BDSM is about exploiting vulnerable people, and that human traffickers are cartoon villains who talk like refugees from a cheap porno movies.