A BREED APART (2025)

3 stars

Signature Entertainment. Digital. 13th October

Some years ago – A movie is shooting on a remote island, starring Hayden Hearst (Hayden Panetierre – basically a cameo, though she does pop up again at a crucial juncture). It features lots of dogs that seem rather rabid! Soon all hell breaks loose as the canines attack their wranglers…

Cut to present day and the island is now owned by influencer Vince (Joey Bragg) – cue the crappy on screen graphics – and is home to the colony of ‘Hollywood dogs gone wild’. He is assisted there by Thalia (Virginia Gardner) and has decided to bring the top five content creators to his enclave, with the idea of saving the dogs and giving the online personalities the chance to win the island itself.

So we get the inventive Queen (Riele Downs), Big Farmer Jay (Page Kennedy), party animal Mason Kelly (Troy Gentile), and siblings Violet Femme (Grace Caroline Currey) and Collins (Zak Steiner), who do silly crazy stuff together in a podcast. Of course they are all pretty annoying – or am I just showing my age?

They arrive by chopper and are shown to their rooms. Next day Vince explains about the uncompleted movie and the bunch of dogs that were left there to roam. He has a vision of building a paradise for the canines. This “elite” group are there for the ‘Great Canine Crusade Challenge’. The person who rescues the most dogs wins the deeds to the island and all the action will filmed and be turned into a reality show.

Of course we know things will start to get wrong fairly rapidly and it is soon a fight for survival as they are attacked by the ferocious free roaming mutts.

We are treated to lots of attacks by the horrible hounds, coupled with some terrible dialogue. There’s no real tension created – despite the whizzy camerawork trying to make things interesting – it’s just a group of people acting stupidly and ending up as dog meat! The whole affair gets more ridiculous as it progresses. Grace Caroline Currey (who appeared with Victoria Gardner in the way better FALL in 2022) is the best thing here – not that that is saying much. The depiction of the killer creatures is a weird mix of real and CGI — or maybe AI —generated imagery.

Brothers Griff and Nathan Furst are responsible for helming this – they also did NIGHTMARE SHARK in 2018 and the former, who works predominantly as an actor, also directed SHARK SHOCK (2017), RAGIN CAJUN REDNECK GATORS (2013) and LAKE PLACID 3 (2010) among others, and clearly has a thing for marauding animals. They also penned the script and it was inspired by the film THE BREED from 2006 scripted by Bob Conte and Peter Wortmann and Executive Produced by Wes Craven.

Steve Kirkham