Buddy films didn’t always go for laughs: some went gritty. Dennis Hopper’s Colors dispensed with chuckles for its tale of the efforts of a veteran (Robert Duvall) and a rookie (Sean Penn) to combat escalating gang violence in East L.A.. Eric Red’s severely underrated Cohen and Tate was another to play it straight. Point Break threw Buddhism, beaches and, um, Patrick Swayze into the mix.
Eager to find fresh angles on the formula, filmmakers cooked up all sorts of crazy variations. One barking mad subgenre was the cop-dog buddy movie. Turner and Hooch was fun, while James Belushi was acted off the screen by a mutt in K-9. Meanwhile, if you looked very closely, you could see the lights going out behind Burt Reynolds’ eyes as he struggled opposite the supremely irritating child actor Norman D. Golden II in Cop and a 1/2, (directed by Henry Winkler aka Happy Days’ The Fonz!)