Les Assiégés

Robert Clouse's "The Pack" is mostly your usual killer pets movie. In this case, people buy dogs at the pound, and leave them on a vacation island. Sure enough, the dogs turn feral and go after the island's inhabitants. While most of the cast does the sorts of things that we expect in one of these movies, Joe Don Baker is quite cool as the leader. But the real stars are definitely the rabid canines. The people behind the camera probably fixed up the main dog so that he would look more menacing; I mean, I've never seen any mutt looking like that.

I notice that this movie was filmed in Bodega Bay, California. Film buffs know that town as the filming location of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". Is every movie filmed there going to feature non-human fauna attacking people?! Another thing - and I may be the only person who thinks of this - is that "The Pack" was released through Warner Bros. When I was really young, I always associated that studio with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc. I wonder: what would I have thought had I known that the studio behind the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons also released horror movies (they also released "The Shining", "The Awakening" and "The Nesting").

But I digress. This movie isn't terrible. Worth seeing maybe once.

Horror movie about a pack of neglected dogs who go wild and start attacking people on an island. It starts out well enough but kind of drags on and, as a result, loses most of its impact. The movie stars Joe Don Baker and a cast of somewhat familiar faces like R.G. Armstrong and the guy who played Paul on Cheers. What works best is the location filming and the use of real dogs. I know that might sound weird but today everything is CGI fakery so I always find the use of "real" refreshing when watching older movies like this. Anyway, there are no standout scenes and you'll probably forget this a week after you watched it. Worth a look once though.

Thanks to uncaring tourists, a pack of wild dogs has slowly been building on Seal Island. Tired of devouring horses, the dogs decide to wag...er, wage an all-out man vs. beast war against the island's inhabitants led by marine biologist Jerry (Joe Don Baker, who qualifies as both man and beast). A pretty darn exciting horror-action flick from director Robert Clouse that re-teams him with Baker after the equally entertaining GOLDEN NEEDLES (1974). Baker is affable, but the real stars here are the pack of canine characters, led by a mongrel that probably spent his later years terrified of mono filament line. The last 40 minutes is basically NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD with dogs and the attack scenes are well staged with some superior slo-mo. The only thing lacking is a higher body count (a paltry 4 human deaths here). There are also some dopey bits like people always running outside and the characters not being attacked as they carry a dead body out of the house because, as Baker puts it, "we have torches." I'm surprised at how much the recent killer dog flick THE BREED (2006) ripped this one off.

On a small tourist island, a handful of people is besieged by a pack of wild dogs. What may at first appear to be a TV movie is actually an R-rated bloodfest, as the hungry canines tear into the folks and rack up an impressive body count. The movie has its share of scary moments, and is surprisingly exciting with carefully choreographed sequences of man versus beast. There is no hesitation on veteran action director Robert Clouse's part to show the dogs being killed in equal measure. One great scene has the hero mowing down several of the pack with his truck. Great musical score to boot. Joe Don Baker stars, and several familiar faces, among them Richard Schull, Bibe Besch and R.G. Armstrong, provide strong support. A must-see for action horror fans. Considering the film was made in the 1970s, it feels like it was shot yesterday.

After the cheap 'n' cheerful sci-fi movies of the '50s which sometimes featured mutant animals, the animals-on-the-rampage genre was promoted into an art form when Alfred Hitchcock scared us all half to death with his horrifying "The Birds". In the years that followed, we had killer sharks (Jaws); killer bees (The Swarm); killer whales (Orca); killer ants (Phase IV); killer amphibians (Frogs); and, believe it or not, killer rabbits (Night Of The Lepus). The Pack, released in 1977 with a cast of solid but not-all-that-well-known actors, is the inevitable killer dogs variation of the theme. When I sat down to watch the film, I expected little from it. Surprisingly, the film proved to be very well-made, with lots of excitement and some skillfully edited dog attacks, plus an unexpected injection of humour (sample: R.G Armstrong has a hilarious line, commenting upon the disappearance of an overweight tourist: "if he had any sense, he'd climb a tree. That is if he can get his fat ass off the ground!")

Marine biologist Jerry (Joe Don Baker) has been working on a remote island called Seal Island, where he has begun to build a house for himself, his girlfriend Millie (Hope Alexander-Willis), and their children from previous marriages. Seal Island has a fairly steady summer tourist trade, but once the holiday season is over the only folks left around are its handful of permanent residents. This year, a small party of bankers also stick around after the summer season for a little extra fishing and recreation. Things get awkward for the holiday-makers and the residents when they learn that a pack of dogs - mostly pets abandoned by tourists at the end of the season - are roaming the island. Starving and rabid, the dogs have started to target people as their likeliest possible food source. One by one, the people on Seal Island are hunted by the bloodthirsty canines and torn apart, leading the survivors to barricade themselves inside a building where they attempt to survive until the arrival of the weekly ferry.

Writer-director Robert Clouse (of Enter the Dragon fame) has fashioned a genuinely exciting story here. It's predictably plotted, yes, but Clouse quickly disguises the fact that this is an old, old story by introducing a clutch of refreshingly oddball characters and building an ever-present undercurrent of suspense. Because the cast is relatively unknown, it becomes hard to guess who will live and who will die (more than once characters you don't expect to get killed do just that, while characters who you're sure are about to be devoured unexpectedly survive). The dog attack sequences are very well handled and seem realistic, which adds to the film's excitement (in films like Nightwing, the animal attacks looked too fake, too funny, to be frightening... but not so in The Pack!) If you're searching for a rampaging animal movie that is actually good, then look no further.