The Breed (2006)

Although I have a soft spot for all sorts of creature features, I run into a bit of a personal problem when said creatures turn out to be dogs, as I tend to like dogs a lot more than people. In my entire life, I have only met one or two dogs I didn’t get along with; while the number of people I haven’t liked is {supercomputer is busy calculating this}. Anyway, on to The Breed.

After a short introduction of a couple docking their sailboat on an island and getting attacked by dogs, we see a seaplane loaded with five twenty-somethings. They are two couples and their Token Black Friend. TBK is doomed of course, because black guys in horror movies don’t last as long as a drummer for Spinal Tap. The two white guys are brothers, with the younger one a high-achiever who is going to medical school and the older the ne-er-do-well of the family. This is a setup for conflict between the two, but since the older brothers is surprisingly competent, it isn’t as much of a contrast as the filmmakers intended. The other two are the girlfriends, one played by Michelle Rodriquez, which immediately started me to speculating about when and how she would die. Rodriquez is the distaff version of Sean Bean, rarely making it to the closing credits with a pulse.

The five are flying to the remote island for a holiday, because the two brothers inherited a house there from a recently deceased uncle. I was having trouble identifying with them, since the only thing I’ve inherited from an uncle was a pair of old boots. The only other building on the island is an abandoned facility where they experimented on dogs, supposedly shut down because all the dogs got rabies and had to be destroyed. Not giving anything away if you looked at the picture of the movie poster above, but group is soon under attack by a pack of feral dogs and trapped in the cabin, where they try to outwit the fidos and escape. It seems that the experiments performed on them made the dogs super aggressive and super intelligent, although there must be limits since they haven’t invented rocket launchers or anything.

There is something of a subplot about those characters that have been bitten and survived becoming more aggressive and losing control, as if the bites had given them rabies or maybe just made them irritable at being gnawed on by Lassie, but this goes nowhere at all. Maybe they were saving that for The Breed 2.

A tense scene from the movie, showing the cast being attacked by one of the killer dogs.

Anyway, both acting and direction are competent, with only a few fast cutaways needed to conceal vicious dogs wagging their tails and sporting doggie smiles. The script isn’t particularly dumb by the low standards of this sort of movie. The scenery is nice (It was filmed in South Africa). I suppose the final judgment on the movie is that it is a perfectly bland, middle of the road horror-thriller. There is nothing much to recommend it or trash it. If you are in the mood for this sort of thing and have nothing else to watch, it will pass the time well enough, I suppose.

The moral of the movie’s story is always carry bags of Milk Bones on your vacation. You will make friends with the murderous dogs, and they’ll eat your friends instead.