The Pack

The Pack

The Pack is about a family who lives in a remote farmhouse surrounded by woods who one night get terrorized by a pack of vicious wild dogs.
The film sets up a nice dynamic early on, it shows the beauty of the land surrounding the farmhouse as the camera lingers on tree limbs or moves slowly through tall grass. It then uses the same landscape to show sheep mangled by wild dogs, being dragged bloody and lifeless across the grass by the farmer and shows the dogs emerge like shadows from the woods as they ferociously attack a human, causing blood to splatter on the same trees the camera was admiring earlier. It's this attention to the environment and atmosphere that got me hooked in the early goings of The Pack. It's an honest look at the double edged sword that is nature, showing what can be at once so beautiful and within seconds turn ugly and deadly.
The Pack is a new kind of home invasion movie, it's not human against human, it's nature against human. There's a notion here that the family in the farmhouse, even though they have clearly lived there for years, are intruding upon the territory of the wild dogs, and vice versa. It's a nice touch that plays on the ongoing and permanent disconnect between man and nature. To man, there's something inherently terrifying about a wild animal, there is no reasoning or debating with it. It has one thing in mind: survival. This is what made Jaws, Cujo, and even the Terminator so effective; take away the human element and you are left with a killing machine. It's this aspect of The Pack that I found so compelling.
The lighting and sound in the film create the feel of a haunted house movie. There are shaky, strobing flashlights and struggling, flickering fluorescents that light the woods or the old interior of the farmhouse. The lurking and low growling wild dogs combined with the distant and surrounding howls of the pack give a moaning, ghostly impression. In the end, The Pack is a haunted home invasion slasher with wild dogs and I applaud the filmmakers for sticking with their vision and taking their time allowing the suspense to slowly build scene after scene. Movies like this is the reason why I love indie horror, they can take more chances and stick with a director's vision that a studio would never allow.
The cast all give solid performances but let's be honest, this show belongs to the wild dogs and while the actors are very capable in their roles, the characters are ultimately forgettable. One disappointment I felt with The Pack was it never offered that all out, balls to the wall, oh shit moment. I was kind of looking forward to, or hoping for (or both), an all out, overwhelming wild dog invasion. I thought it would happen by the end but it never happened. The film is instead content with building a lot of tension and displaying several very cool moments and separate bloody attacks.
Overall The Pack was a very solid horror flick that I had a lot of respect for. It plays with the style and hits the beats of many sub-genres that kept me entertained from beginning to end.