A Breed Apart

by Mike McGranaghan

It’s time to put a moratorium on horror movies where all the characters are social media influencers. Inevitably, this means we’re going to be forced to spend two hours with one-dimensional, self-absorbed nitwits, because nobody ever thinks to write them as anything else. A Breed Apart is the latest film to rely on this creaky trend. That’s hardly the worst problem, but it’s absolutely the first.

A Mr. Beast-like YouTuber named Vince (Joey Bragg) invites five influencers to the island he owns. The only one who matters is Violet (Grace Caroline Currey). Ostensibly, they’ve been gathered to rescue the wild dogs roaming around, having been left behind by a film crew years ago after an on-set catastrophe. The player to round up the most will win the island. In reality, the dogs are rabid and bloodthirsty, meaning the characters’ lives are in grave danger. Violet turns to Vince’s assistant Thalia (Virginia Gardner) for help, although her perpetually stoned state renders her of questionable use.

Because she’s prominently featured on the poster, I should mention that Hayden Panettiere has a pointless supporting role as the actress who starred in the ill-fated production.

The threadbare plot is merely an excuse for A Breed Apart’s true purpose – to have endless scenes of rabid dogs attacking people. Other movies have certainly provided satisfying lightweight entertainment by focusing on animal-vs-human action, Crawl being an excellent example. All it requires is a little skill. Directors Griff and Nathan Furst lack such skill. The siblings - whose prior credits include Nightmare Shark, Trailer Park Shark, and Ghost Shark - are so inept they make Sharknado director Anthony C. Ferrante look like Paul Thomas Anderson in comparison. They’re clueless on how to build suspense, and the extremely sloppy editing only makes matters worse.

Even that might have been okay if the dog attack scenes were fun. Sadly, far too much of the movie is accomplished via inexcusably low-grade CGI, thereby robbing the action scenes of their impact. The dogs rarely look real, a fact that guarantees your pulse doesn’t raise one iota. Who in their right mind would be afraid of these Dollar General FX canines? In a similar vein, a sequence where the humans attempt to outrun the dogs via Jeep has unmistakenly been accomplished by having the actors perform in front of a green screen. To call it “fakey” would be an understatement. Who thought the picture was releasable with these shoddy visuals?

As a fan of the excellent 2022 thriller Fall, I thought it was fun to see Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner together again. Too bad they don’t have interesting characters to play, compelling things to do, or any real threat to face. What a sad state of affairs when an old radio tower is far more frightening than a pack of killer dogs.

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