Weird Wednesdays: Love On A Leash

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Love on a Leash, filmed in the mid-2000s and released in 2011, is a relatively newer entry in the so-bad-it’s-good canon. Those in-the-know spread its gospel well, with a ready-to-go screening experience available on Tubi, a newer hub for internet-addled film buffs. While big name midnight movie masterpieces usually come with an alluring backstory and a quintessentially surreal auteur, think Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen, Love on a Leash sits on it’s own absurd laurels with a relatively unknown production, almost no name-filmmakers tied to it, and only recent podcast deep-dives (like a 2022 episode of the comedy film podcast, “How Did This Get Made?”) available to learn anything about it.

For its benefit, what we do know is all in the movie. At a nearly sold out Weird Wednesday screening, I sat with a bunch of squirmish, involuntarily howling film fans as a modern twist on the classic “The Frog Prince” fairy tale unraveled into something twisted and demented and lacking in any traditional metric of “well-made cinema.” The story of Lisa (Jana Camp) and her dog lover, Prince/Alvin Flang, has the personal touches of an extremely misguided auteur, but also has the clear influence of folks outside of the writer-director-producer Fen Tian, whether she wanted it that way or not. In an effort to dissect the film into the parts that take it from a forgettable passion project to a magical monstrosity, I have highlighted a few of the key players in Love On A Leash that I believe are invaluable in that transition.

Stephen Kramer Glickman, prior to his time as a cast member on Big Time Rush and the Craig Moss parodies of the 2010s, performed voice over services for Love On A Leash as the voice of the dog Prince, who is actually a man named Alvin Flang trapped in a dog’s body. The man that the dog transforms into is not Glickman, does not sound like Glickman, and most absurdly of all, does not behave like Glickman’s performance at all. Aneese Khamo, who plays the human Prince, displays all of the attributes of the “golden retriever” boyfriend archetype, who goes to the ends of the Earth for his lover Lisa. Glickman, on the other hand, delivers a surreal off-the-cuff voiceover that makes Prince out to be the worst human/dog in romantic comedy history. He is aggressively mean to Lisa, calling her names and clearly only chasing after her for her ability to turn him into a human again. He is rude and careless regarding the people and the events that occur around him, coming across as a character that is 90% horny and 10% racist. His most positive thoughts and outlooks on life only come in improvised, anti-melodic songs he sings about himself, what he is currently doing, and how it’s all so, so, so weird.

Miraculously, with a cult-movie kind of logic, this disconnect raises the cookie-cutter characterization of Prince the human and creates a hilarious alternative narrative that follows the entire film. Boring choices get a distinctly-2000s ironic edge that rings true to the kind of characters that operate in this world. All of Fen Tian’s prospective lovers are intentionally odd characters with contradictory personality types and the women feeding these men to Lisa are outrageous in their own right. Whether Glickman noticed this or just goofed through a voiceover session, his Prince accentuates the wildness of the story, contributing to the sometimes intentional and mostly out-of-the-left-field comedy in Love On A Leash. Glickman performs Prince as an asshole, and he gets to establish this long before we see Khamo’s “golden retriever” boyfriend personality, meaningfully altering the audience's experience with the love of Lisa’s life. 

On the opposite end of the film, the absurdity is held close enough to Earth to keep an audience paying attention through Jana Camp’s performance as Lisa. With a slice of sincere dreamy optimism not unlike Naomi Watts’ Betty in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (it should also be noted that Love On A Leash looks like it was filmed on the same digital camera as Lynch’s Inland Empire and shares a similar unsettling visual style, although likely unintentional), Lisa doesn’t lean into any perceived silliness like Stephan Kramer Glickman. This level of commitment to the film’s bizarre world is key to elevating bad ideas to the level of genuine so-bad-it’s-good. Even if Glickman seems to be goofing around and drastically hamming in his performance, it is obviously played in the context of the film for comedy. In a similar vein, Camp’s performance has zero interest in commenting on the quality or the seriousness of the story, allowing it to transcend the genre of parody films that one might try to wrap this up into.

In a unique way, the work of Peter Davidson as composer must be celebrated in the birth of this contemporary midnight movie classic. While those who attended the screening were gifted with a titular song (one of my personal favorite genres of film music, gotta love learning what the movie is about with a catchy hook) and a fully-realized score, the widest release of the film features no music at all. Audiences for this version have to endure long stretches of silence interrupted by scenes that sound like there are zero audio overdubs and only the footage we see to cut between (just like the Danish avant garde would want it). Rumored to be a dispute over money, money that possibly went to the only music in the “finished” film: 15 seconds of David Bowie’s “China Girl”, the composer requested the removal of his soundtrack and score from the film and, in a way, gave Love On A Leash an absurdist edge unique to its popular contemporaries in strange cinema. 

In the creation of the next big Oscar winner, the next timeless arthouse cinema creation, or the best car crash of a film you’ve ever seen, artists and craftspeople work together to make it happen. No matter how intense and consistent an artistic vision can be, these films are the result of tireless efforts made in the pursuit of something great. Love On A Leash is, most likely, not the film that Fen Tian set out to make, but her trust in her collaborators, whether she had the time, space, or budget to voluntarily trust people, led to a special and unique piece of work. These workers trusted their gut and intuition like Glickman, focused on the goals of the work and their director like Camp, and they respected their time and energy relative to how they were being compensated, like Davidson. As a result, Love On A Leash exists in that space between a movie that shouldn’t have been released and one that should be seen by anybody with the patience for something truly weird. 

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