The Pack

Well-made, small scale Aussie survival horror that won't blow you away, but will entertain for the odd 80 mins. The familiarity of the premise's set-up (isolated family farmhouse under sieged/terrorised by wild dogs) and by the numbers story progression is offset by the intensity and viciousness of the well staged attack scenes. It can get quite nasty, and the foreshadowing in those scenes make it suspenseful.

A family becomes trapped as a pack of man eating, feral dogs descend on their property.

This isn't an awful film but there isn't a whole lot to it. It has little in the way of character development or a solid story so that you can invest in the family. It didn't have much gore or blood but there was brutal suggestiveness in the attacks. We didn't even get to see much of the dogs. After all my complaints, I still liked the film. I could see this as a Lifetime movie.

This may not be the best of its kind (no pun intended), but it is a very decent low budget effort. And it has a couple of surprising moments in it (twists), that are nice. The acting is OK, again always considering this is a low budget affair. The effects are nicely made and work for this movie too.

I watched it at a Festival and while no one was too excited about it, there weren't too many people who felt it was a waste of their time either. Of course the movie has it's clichés too and before we get a few nice turns we also get what we expect. It's teenage problems combined with the supernatural, with a tick of family issues thrown in for good measure.

My quick rating - 5,1/10. Was much better then expected by reading the summary. Basically a family on the brink of losing their house in the middle of the outback is suddenly under siege by a "pack" of attack dogs. Yes, it does sound somewhat stupid by that but taking a simplistic idea and doing something with it (without cheating and using a 200 million dollar budget) is something to be said. The acting is good and seems very matter of fact. The characters just had believable qualities that helped the story along. The pace was done well and of course turns into high gear when the animals go into full attack mode. Speaking of, the effects were fine and not overdone are bad cgi laden. Overall not a bad unknown little flick that has a couple decent scares.

The trailer makes it look so much better than it actually is. All the kills by the dogs lack suspense and are the same quick cuts so you really can't see what the heck is going on during the kills because of the bad editing. And every stupid plot device was used to make it impossible for the family to just pick up the phone and call animal welfare to come and handle these feral beasts.

I have 200 more characters to go because this site insists that every review must be a long, drawn out novella instead of being short and to the point like a review should be.

The movie is boring boring boring.... Minimum character limit met. I'm done.