Pack

The Pack (1977)

It is the off-season for Seal Island and all the vacationing families have hopped on the ferry back to the mainland. Unfortunately many have left the dogs that they brought with them behind. Starving and lead by a particularly aggressive mutt they form a pack and go hunting. When the birds and other game have been eaten they move onto what is left, the few people still living on the island. One of the locals is a Fish and Game warden named Jerry. With his help the survivors hold up in a barricaded house until the next boat arrives from the mainland. But can they last 4 days surrounded by a very hungry pack of dogs?

Not sure how it happened but the Pack is one of the few genre movies from the ‘70s that I hadn’t seen yet. I heard a lot of people talking about, but even after tracking down a copy I ignored it for a couple of years. Though obviously since I’m reviewing it I did finally watch the movie. I’m really impressed. The movie is paced nicely and takes a while before the canine mayhem really gets going. But that is a good thing because The Pack does a great job of establishing it human characters and more importantly the dogs as well. The opening is genius with a summer family tying up their dog in the woods because they don’t’ want to take it home to the city. After it gets loose we follow it, with the rope still tied to it’s neck, as it finds shelter with the pack. Right away the movie is showing you that the dogs about to terrorize the island have been abandoned by irresponsible people. Making the animals sympathetic is a genius move and not something that I’ve seen before in a genre movie like this. Top that off with the very last shot of the movie which freezes as the credits roll by makes The Pack stand out. This is a very solid script and a nice bit of storytelling.

Beyond a chewed up horse there isn’t much gore in this movie. So don’t go into this one expecting a lot of blood. I do have to say that the attacks are pulled off with some skill. Being the ‘70s they obviously didn’t have CGI so we get real dogs rolling around with real actors. Yeah I know many of the tricks that they used to get the dogs to “attack” so convincingly but it works. This is helped by some slick editing and camera work that allows the audience to fill in the blanks and visualize what they think is happening. I don’t want to sound like a broken record to those that read my reviews by complaining about movies made today. That said not having cheap digital effects as a crutch forced filmmakers to come up with creative ways to tell these kinds of stories, and results in the kind of movie magic we see here.

If you can’t tell yet I dig this movie. It has everything that I would want from an animals gone bad flick, tosses in an interesting script, and is executed by a director that keeps things moving while letting us get to know the characters. I recommend that everyone track down a copy of The Pack.

3 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer