Watching the new pimped-out double DVD release of "101 Dalmatians,' I was reminded, once again, why Walt Disney deserves to be dragged around Hell by his nuts for eternity by 101 Dalmatian puppies. Every few years, when this cash cow gets re-released to theaters or dumped back on the DVD market in a new, full-of-useless-bonus-material "special edition," puppy mills are stripped clean of their stock of inbred Dalmatians. The "oooh, aren't they cute" factor in "101 Dalmatians" is so over the top, that hordes of status-seeking middle class idiots race each other to the dung-strewn underbelly of the dog breeding world to spend hundreds of dollars on a dog whose only redeeming factor is that it looks like it was designed by Versace when he was 8 years old. The ultimate result is that within months dog pounds, farms at the edge of town, Humane Society shelters, dog rescue operations, and Asian restaurants are buried in more white dogs with black spots than Ellen DeGeneres can shake a stick at. What the ill-informed soccer parents who put one of these dogs on their stretched-to-the-limit Visa cards don't know is that Dalmatians are crap family dogs. Dalmatians, generally, are stupid, willful, untrainable, and generally behave as if they just got into Uncle Dave's meth stash. They would rather eat a child than romp with it. Like cigarette packs, this DVD should have come with a warning label: "Walt Disney was a shit. Cartoons aren't real life. Don't buy a Dalmatian. You moron."

The story takes place in mid-Twentieth Century England. In fact, the story could only take place in the past. If the setting was today's Britain, there would be no story, as all Cruella DeVille would have to do to get a Dalmatian-skin coat is go online and place a special order with a sweatshop in Thailand. In spirit, the film resembles the also set-in-England "Mary Poppins", which would come three years later, and star 100 fewer dogs. The story, as 4.6 billion people already know, is about a hideous Tory crone (is that redundant?), named Cruella DeVille, who steals a shitload of talking dogs so she can have their skins made into a coat. Although, you'd think that 101 dogs would make not only a coat, but perhaps a nice pantsuit, as well. On a positive note, this is one of the few kid movies that doesn't kill off the starring dog at the end, although, if they did that here, the massacre would have been so horrific they would have had to set the story in Baghdad. On another positive note, in a Nostradamus-like feat of prophecy, this movie was able predict, thirty years before the fact, what Glenn Close would be like in middle age. If you watch the movie, and then wade through all the junk on the extra DVD, your brain will feel like it's been humped by all 101 Dalmatians.

--Oddball