A Breed Apart

Griff Furst's A Breed Apart is a brutal, pulse-pounding ride that strips away the glitz of influencer culture and replaces it with raw, primal terror. While the premise teases satire, what unfolds is a surprisingly grounded survival horror that keeps its foot on the gas from start to finish.

Violet, portrayed with resilience and grit by Hayden Panettiere, is introduced as a clout-chasing rebel with a love for dogs especially the abandoned and misunderstood. When she's lured to a remote island under the promise of exclusive content and viral fame, she and her fellow influencers find themselves caught in a deadly trap. Their task? Hunt down the island's mythic, man-eating dogs before becoming their next meal.

The genius of A Breed Apart lies in its claustrophobic setting and escalating tension. Furst doesn't waste time; the horror hits early and hard. The island, lush and haunting, becomes a character in its own right its silence broken only by the screams of the hunted and the snarls of predators that have clearly adapted to outwit man.

What makes this film stand out from other creature horrors is its lack of reliance on jump scares. Instead, Furst builds dread organically, drawing on isolation, mistrust among the guests, and the ever-present fear that they've underestimated the intelligence and coordination-of the monstrous canines.

Virginia Gardner and Grace Caroline Currey deliver grounded performances, showing the slow unraveling of personas as survival instincts take over. There's little glamour in this world; even the most polished characters are stripped down to their most desperate selves.

Don't expect a morality tale or a biting satire this is horror through and through. A Breed Apart succeeds by not holding back. It's tense, fast-paced, and violent without apology.

Needless to say that I had of course never heard about this 2025 movie titled "A Breed Apart" prior to getting the chance to sit down and watch it.

The movie's cover, however, just permeates with low budget vibes, so I can't claim that I harbored great expectations to the movie. And any movie that is written, directed and starring the same person is usually not great. But I still opted to give the movie the benefit of the doubt.

"A Breed Apart" was apparently inspired by "The Breed" from 2006. So that counted for something I suppose.

The writers put together a pretty straight forward script. And the narrative was actually not bad, but the insanely poor CGI ruined the movie, hands down.

The acting performances in the movie were actually fair.

The CGI animated dogs in the movie were hilarious to look at. They were so insanely poor animated and rendered that it was unfathomable. I am flabbergasted at how something that atrocious can manage to pass quality control in 2025. Didn't anyone in the CGI or editing department stop up and go "wait a minute, this looks terrible"? It just was difficult to look past the God awful CGI in the movie, especially since the dogs played such a crucial part in the narrative. And the dog that was able to crawl a rope? Well, that was just epic.

I managed to sit through the movie in its entirety, but believe me this is not a movie that will ever grace my screen a second time.

My rating of "A Breed Apart" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.

What was the budget of the movie?! How many steaks, pizzas, bread, or feeding the poor, malnourished people all over the world would that help. Studios funding those craps should be simply annihilated.

As for the movie if that could be called a movie, besides some funny acting, beautiful ever young faces like Virginia Gardner and a powerfully sad Hayden Panettiere who had far better days with 'Heroes' there's nothing more to root for besides some stupid dogs and humans, there were some realistic moments, uncanny chases (for jokes of course) and even a shark!

They need to combine this with Jurassic World and make a series of it, rabid dogs, flying dragons and T-Rex what a joyful combo that would make.

• Screenplay/storyline/plots: 2
• Production value/impact: 3
• Development: 4.5
• Realism: 2
• Entertainment: 2.5
• Acting: 4
• Filming/photography/cinematography: 5
• VFX: 4.5
• Music/score/sound: 4.5
• Depth: 2
• Logic: 1
• Flow: 2.5
• Drama/horror/action/tragedy: 2
• Ending: 1.5.

After getting us bored with the cheesy n cheap movies like sharknados, 2 n 3 headed sharks, mega sharks, mega python, giant octopus, bermuda tentacles, mega piranhas, crocosaurus, meth gator, etc we r treated with a much worse movie.

This movie is worse than Syfy original films n Asylum films.

It tries hard but it is clearly made on a B-budget.

The animatronics and CGI dogs r lol.

The movie has too many issues, most notably with the budget and the effects. The CGI is extremely 90s video games quality.

The Pack 1977 did it much better decades ago.

Hayden Panettiere has about a two-minute cameo in the opening, and then we don't see her again until much later and that end scene of her arriving to save the day was so much predictable.

She has gained so much weight that she is wearing loose cargo pants n shirts.

She was much slimmer n hot in Scream 4.

And it pains me to say because most of the actors in this movie I have really enjoyed, and I'm sure, will enjoy, in many other projects. Even knowing actors in this industry are going through a really rough time right now, I cannot figure out how they ended up in this, at BEST, Saturday night SyFy channel, "The Asylum Presents"-level movie. (Edit: I've just learned those are the EXACT type of movies these directors have done previously so no wonder.)

The acting is fine enough. But the writing-holy hell, so many missed opportunities to have some unique kills or do something interesting with the "disease" the dogs had beyond having one...climb a rope. That's not even the worst part though. It's, you guessed it, the use of AI.

This movie has the worst special effects I've seen in 15 years or so. And it's because they decided to use what looks like the free version of an iPhone AI app to generate a good 99 percent of what the main focus of this movie is...the dogs. From the very beginning, the AI generated dogs take you out of it, killing all tension of the scene. And with that, we're already seeing how AI will help kill jobs and creativity. No visual effects artists were employed here. Some terrible prompt-created mess which was just pasted in throughout the movie. And no doubt the tech will get better in the future but think about how much energy must've been used to create the slop in this movie, then think about how much it will take when it's Marvel-level ready. It's the beginning of the end folks.

Anyway, I'm giving this two stars because it did keep me engaged, but just because I could not stop taking in how truly, truly awful it was.