A simple one-gag affair
19 December 2008
It was close to nap time when a pair of legs walked into the office of Dick Dobson, private investigator. Her talk of kidnapped cookies didn't interest him at first but ultimately he is a sucker for a beautiful girl and soon finds himself on a simple case that quickly gets more complex and dangerous than he planned.

The title tells you all you need to know because this short film is a spoof on the tough private detectives of the noir-ish genres but with kids and cookies instead of adults and Maltese falcons. It starts this way and this is just what it does. The gag is that the conventions of the genre (the bar, the aim of the case) are replaced by kiddie stuff while the presentation (lighting, narration, characters) remains the same. The problem with it is that it doesn't have much more to it than that unfortunately. Dalton's direction is very good and he does capture the feel of the genre in the look, feel and tone of the film but apart from one funny line (about the coke) there is not enough in his script to hold the interest for the whole running time. It is not terrible of course, just very one-note.

As a very quick short film it can just about carry this but for all his good work in other areas I found it hard to ignore the question of what might have been if Dalton had spent a bit more time expanding and improving on his script. The only other thing of note about the film is that the version broadcast recently on propeller had terrible sound quality (which had not affected other films shown at the same time). Not sure if it was this broadcast of it or what but it did make it very hard to listen to.
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