Reviewed by Neil Davey
Stars Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Lively,
Oliver Hudson, Taryn Manning
Written by Robert Conte & Peter Martin Wortmann
Produced by Wes Craven
Certification US R | UK 15
Runtime 90 minutes
Directed by Nicholas Mastandrea
The Breed is a horror movie. It has a 15 certificate. Thereby hangs a problem. Unless you’re an exceptional director, you can’t scare a crowd with no 18-certificate visceral trimmings. However, that’s not the film’s biggest problem. It’s biggest problem is that it’s unintentionally the funniest film of the year to date. There’s a germ of a good idea here. Take the standard horror set-up — group of teens / young people arrive in remote spot — and, instead of mysterious supernatural forces or alien beasties or hockey-mask wearing psychopath, put them up against a vicious, unexpected natural phenomena. In this case, that’s a pack of wild dogs. Throw in a couple of recognisable faces — Lost’s Michelle Rodriguez, Eight Mile’s Taryn Manning — and you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a film with potential.
Twenty minutes in, you’ll be wavering. There’s an okay (if badly acted) set-up scene — boating couple find remote island, bushes rustle, woman disappears — and then its over to the young pretty people: brothers Matt (Eric Lively) and John (Oliver Hudson), Matt’s girlfriend — and John’s ex — Nicki (Rodriguez) and two others (Manning, and the amiable Hill Harper). They have some initial interaction with the unusual dogs — weird, they think, but nothing to get so concerned about — and then it all goes pear-shaped: both the weekend AND the film, that is. Because these aren’t normal dogs, you see. Oh no. They’re genetically-enhanced, super-intelligent dogs, created for army use and abandoned. They can chew through ropes and deliberately sabotage things (including the film as a whole). When one of the party is bitten — and seems to develop some sort of strange supernatural, dog-like hearing super sense as a result (like so much of the film, this is set up and then not followed through) — they decide to jump back in the seaplane and go home. Ah, but the dogs have sabotaged the plane, you see, cunning hounds that they are, so they’re forced to stay and fight.
People die (in pretty much the order you’d expect), all tension — such as it was — disappears, yadda yadda yadda. And if you can sit through it without either wanting to leave or chuckling at the sheer stupidity of everything on screen, why then you’re a better man than I. You almost wish they’d switched the dogs — Alsatians, Doberman-esque things, etc — for Dachshunds and just played it deliberately for laughs. Then again, it couldn’t have been any funnier.
• Official Site
• The Breed at IMDb