Purely Joyful Movie!

Fantastic!

Excellent, smart action film.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Enjoying a weekend getaway, a group of high-society friends arrive on a secluded island getaway for a vacation finds the entire island is overrun by wild dogs left behind over the years and turned into vicious, hungry kills forcing them to battle the dogs to get away alive.This one here wasn't all that bad and has some good things about it. One of the film's most enjoyable parts is the more realistic and outright plausible scenarios possible for this kind of story, as there's a great tone throughout here that makes for a nice time throughout here. The idea of having this be based around the dogs that have now turned feral and wild out in the wilderness makes for a pretty realistic scenario for this type of story, and is handled in a logical manner with them simply looking for nourishment rather than attacking for any kind of mutation-based change or other forms of alterations that have been attempted over the years. This naturalistic element present here makes for a great basis here and that gives the attacks throughout here a far more realistic bent to them which is aided along nicely by the savageness of the action within here, as they get really chilling with the encounter at the blind man's shack and a great encounter in their home where the swarm traps them inside the car only to eventually be driven away by the neighbor's intervention. A later chase scene through the woods and out to a large rocky outcropping on the top of a cliff is another rather enjoyable action-packed chase with the dogs continually closing in until the final encounter out by the sea, and there's even more great fun to be had here with their attempts at stopping the pack from them storming their hideout in the rain to the failed attempt at running them over with the car and the absolutely crazy attack on their fortress as the pack breaks in at several spots forcing them into some inventive and fun barricading themes that are part of what makes this so much fun. That all of these scenes are fun is mostly due to the fact that there's real dogs in here that are portrayed in here as there's a rather appreciated feel here that comes from the use of real dogs there to interact with and it really manages to score quite well here. However, that also brings out the film's single biggest flaw with the realistic use of the dogs here making this one incredibly hard to sit through which happens with all the brutality inflicted not only by them but also against them. The scenes of the dogs being whacked with baseball bats, clubbed with pieces of logs and being chased around a small lot in a car that's barely missing their legs and snapping jaws is quite hard to watch seeing that the dogs are that close to being in real danger makes for quite a troubling watch for those that have a sensitivity to watching dogs in peril. Likewise, the beginning to this one takes a while to get going as there's a rather long display featuring their going around the island with the dogs in the background that doesn't really have much else going for it. That's all that this one has holding it down.Rated R: Violence, Language, children-in-jeopardy and violence- against-animals.

Director Robert Clouse showed himself to be fairly versatile when it came to his projects. After having already made one bona fide classic with the martial arts actioner "Enter the Dragon" and the similarly fun "Black Belt Jones", he went on to do the futuristic sci-fi saga "The Ultimate Warrior". Here he tackles the "nature strikes back" sub genre with very enjoyable results. It takes place on a resort island where the year round residents, and some visitors, now have to deal with the problem of a ferocious dog pack that is the result of vacationers having adopted these dogs for the summer and then abandoned them. Yeah, there's a real message in here about mankind's callousness towards his fellow animals that gives this movie some appreciated (and not overdone) subtext in addition to its thrills. There's no filler here, just a good, straightforward story (based on a novel by David Fisher) that moves forward at a decent pace. The rural scenery is, not unexpectedly, very nicely photographed and the booming music by Lee Holdridge is perfect accompaniment. The animal action is first rate - the principal trainer is Karl Lewis Miller, an old hand at that kind of thing for many years, and he gets utterly convincing performances from the canine stars, especially the primary antagonist, a mangy mongrel, and the pathetic straggler of the group who we see abandoned near the beginning of the movie. The human cast does not fare badly, either, with the ever solid Joe Don Baker, playing a marine biologist, as the kind of hero you can root for. (Of course, there are also the standard characters in this thing who you pretty much *hope* are going to come to a bad end.) Hope Alexander-Willis is his appealing leading lady, and the supporting cast features such reliable performers as Richard B. Shull and R.G. Armstrong. It never gets too graphic, preferring to leave some things to the imagination, but doesn't skimp on the thrills, being genuinely exciting at times, especially in the last half hour. Overall it's more effective than the movie "Dogs" which was also released in that busy period, post-"Jaws", when a number of movies like this were coming out. It's entertaining all the way; that final sequence will just melt your heart. Clouse returned to animal horror five years later with "The Rats", a.k.a. "Deadly Eyes". Eight out of 10.

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.

A woodsy island with a few locals that's occasionally visited by tourists is endangered by a pack of about fifteen feral dogs. They're mostly dogs tourists bought and brought to the island to keep them company for a vacation, then left behind. The leader is very mangy- looking, and usually baring its fangs. The rest look more like pets. The last addition is a dog we get to see being abandoned, and while it is accepted by the pack, it straggles behind, often getting its leash stuck on fallen trees and so on. We get to have some sympathy for it. The movie might have been better if they picked wilder-looking or more muscular dogs, or ones that could act meaner.The wild dogs are first discovered when the dog belonging to Joe Don Baker's marine biologist character is attacked by the leader, and Baker spots it. Initially, it's thought to be the only wild dog. However, it becomes apparent it's one of many, and unfortunately Baker's CB radio isn't working, and a ferry isn't due for four more days.For those into gore, not much of the attacks are shown, and dead people are never shown (though people are killed), only some dead dogs are seen after being shot or run over. There's some foul language and no nudity.There's an older man on the island who apparently hired a woman to have sex with his simpleton overweight son of thirty or forty years of age (they don't - he's not interested). Those characters were pretty annoying. Other characters are pretty inefficient about boarding up or barricading doors and windows against the dogs, and people who know about the dogs still drive around with their car windows down all the way. A bit with a rowboat peters out without much resolution, when I expected some.