Over the course of the last ten years or so, Genre filmmakers have resurrected just about every horror sub-genre from the 70’s and 80’s, so it was only a matter of time before they got around to the environmental horrors of the 1970’s. About the time of the birth of Greenpeace and the EPA, there were a number of ‘nature fights back’ films like Prophecy and Grizzly and many have argued that Australia did it best with the film Long Weekend. The Pack also hails from down under and tells the story of a sheep rancher who lives with his veterinarian wife and family in deep rural Australia. A pack of wild dogs kills all their sheep and then come after the family, trapping them in their house and fighting to survive.
The dogs are actually pretty scary. Through careful photography, they carry plenty of menace and that terror that comes from knowing a wild animal has you out in the open. Unfortunately, the family is made up of not very interestingly drawn characters; mostly they’re just there to be chased. Most of the situations they find themselves in are just the result of poor decision making. Pair that with an oddly mismatched soundtrack and you’re left with a film that’s just a bit of a slog; an 88 minute game of hide and seek. You’ll find yourself waiting impatiently for the next time the dogs attack just to get things moving again and those moments are few and far between.
The Pack features a ‘making of’ featurette and the theatrical trailer.
Some reviewers were not fans of the original for one reason or another. I liked it, Roth has a certain bent humor and an eye for gore. The original may have been uneven, but there was definitely an interesting and stomach-turning film going on there. That said, this new one has no purpose at all to exist. It takes the not-that-old original, drains the life out of it, replaces all the characters with bland robots, sanitizes the picture, and then spits it back out again. It plays almost like ‘Stab’ does to the Scream movies; you know, a parody movie within a movie that recreates the events using some overly pretty people.
Please do not spend money on this. Please do not reward whatever sick joke Eli Roth is playing on us by allowing this thing to invade the horror marketplace. I watched all 98 minutes of it and I can verify that the 0% aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes is richly deserved. There is, however, some amusement to be found in the ‘making of’ featurette where the director and producers try to sell us on the idea that the way to improve over Roth’s original is to remove the humor and fun altogether and replace it with a lot more fake blood.
Adam Ruhl is a writer and life long Cinephile. He is the Executive
Cinema Editor of Pop Culture Beast’s Austin branch; covering festivals,
conventions, and new releases. When not filing reports, Adam can be
found stalking Alamo Drafthouse Programmers for leads on upcoming
DrafthouseFilms titles. Adam once blocked Harry Knowles entrance to a
theater until he was given extra tickets to a Roman Polanski movie.