Hot Dog... The Movie (1984) on Netflix
Young skier Harkin Banks travels to Squaw Valley for the Freestyle World Championship. He picks up runaway Sunny and befriends Dan O'Callahan's skiers, facing arrogant champion Rudi Garmisch.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Harkin Banks is a naive, skiing-obsessed, young man from Idaho who travels to Sqwak Mountain, California to compete in the FIA International Skiing Competition. Along the way Harkin picks up wild and outgoing teenage runnaway, Sunny, who decides to tag along with him. Then Harkin meets skiing professional Dan O'Callahan and his group of misfit skiers to compete against the arrogant, three-time FIA champion Rudi Garmisch. While Harkin squares off with Rudi by day, he and Dan go partying by night with their friends which includes hot-tob and steam-room making out with various women, including Rudi's former bombshell flame Sylvia.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hot Dog... The Movie (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Mike Marvin made several low-budget ski films in the early 1970s, including Earth Rider in 1972 about the first ski BASE jump from El Capitan; producer Edward S. Feldman was impressed by Marvin's stories from that time and offered him a feature film if he could put the experiences into a screenplay.
- Since most of the actors could not ski, stunt doubles had to be used for all of the ski scenes, including Frank Beddor, who was very successful in the World Cup; only Lynn Wieland and George Theobald came from the local freestyle scene, and the 19-year-old Wieland was US champion in moguls and jumping in 1980 and 1981.
- The expression "Chinese downhill" was picked up by Marvin about ten years before filming; mass start races of the kind had a tradition in many ski resorts, were held in Squaw Valley until a fatal accident in 1974, and in Aspen were called "Irish downhill".
- The film's most famous scene, the final descent, was filmed on the 1960 Olympic course and includes costumes that, in combination with the chase, are intended as an allusion to Mad Max 2.
- According to the participants, in addition to generous pay there was a lot of free time between shoots, which was spent celebrating wild parties; years later Marvin spoke of a "Sodom and Gomorrah behind the scenes".
- Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, gave a generally positive review, describing the film as "light and less moronic than it might have been", and it is considered the most commercially successful ski film of all time.
