A young boy is
profoundly effected by his mother's death and refuses to
accept it. Mark's father is sensitive to his feelings and is
deeply concerned about his son. Nevertheless, he must leave
the boy for a few weeks while he goes to Tokyo to close an
important business deal. He makes arrangements for Mark to
stay with family in New England and decides to drive across
country from Arizona so that they can have some special time
together before their unavoidable separation.
They arrive at
Mark's aunt and uncle's home where they meet Mark's cousin,
six year old Connie, and Henry, who is Mark's age. The adults
hope that a friendship will form between the boys and help
take Mark's mind off his grieving. At first, it seems to work
and the boys have fun together, but soon Mark discovers Henry
has a mean streak. Henry's pranks become more and more vicious
and it isn't long before Mark believes Henry is capable of
murder. When Mark tries to tell the adults how evil and
dangerous Henry is, no one will believe him. They won't
believe him because the diabolically clever Henry has everyone
convinced that he is the good son and that Mark is misbehaving
badly as an emotional reaction to his grief
The first animal
scene involves a Staffordshire Terrier who chases the boys as
they run across a long narrow foot bridge. Just as the dog is
about to catch the boys they reach the other side and go
through a gate and quickly close it behind them preventing the
dog from reaching them. Henry taunts the dog from the safety
of the other side of the gate by barking and growling at the
dog and the dog reacts accordingly. This scene was shot in
cuts filming the boys and the dog separately. The trainer gave
the dog visual and verbal cues to get it to cross the bridge.
To get the dog to react properly when he reached the gate, the
trainer gave verbal cues and waved a baton in the air to get
the dog to bark and growl. For close-up shots of the dog
reacting to Henry, two trainers held and supported the dog so
he could be photographed at the top of the gate (the dog was
comfortable with this). The trainers were off-camera and
served as added insurance that the dog did not harm the lead
actor. In a later scene the same dog is walking across the
same foot bridge when Henry is playing with a catapult gun on
a nearby hill. When he sees the dog, he fires the gun and you
hear a dog's cry off-camera. You then see the dog walking in a
crouched position. The next scene shows Henry and Mark
carrying a heavy burlap sack which they dump into an abandoned
well. The sack supposedly contained the body of the dead dog.
This scene was also shot in cuts. The dog was filmed
responding to his trainer's verbal commands to
"come", to "slow", to "drop" and
to "roll over." Makeup artists applied a
"wound" with stage blood which was non-toxic. A dead
dog is never seen and, of course, none was in the burlap sack.
In a scene involving
a cat, Henry is playing with his catapult gun when he sees a
cat grooming itself on a wall. He lines the cat up in the
sights of the gun and fires it, but the arrow hits a tree
slightly above and behind the cat and the cat scampers away.
This scene was filmed in cuts. The rock wall that the cat was
sitting on was fake and had an electric heater installed
underneath it so the cat would be warm and comfortable and sit
there throughout the necessary filming. Tuna fish juice was
applied to the cat's paws to get the cat to lick them. The
arrow that was catapulted out of the gun and hit the tree,was
filmed separately, and the cat was not there when it was
fired. To get the cat to run off at the proper time, the
trainer used a buzzer to signal the cat to come to her. The
only other animal action is a brief shot of a hawk flying in
the sky.
Animal action was
monitored by American Humane, with on set supervision by the
Animal Rescue League of Boston.
