Good Son, The (1993)

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.