When 1970s Animals Attack

A movie that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded fun was The Pack. Recently, I got around to watching it to do a review on here.

Seal Island is some miles off the coast, with only a few people living on it over the winter. One of those is going to be Jerry (Joe Don Baker) and his family, as he's taking a job at the scientific research station on the island. During the summer, however, the place is a summer resort for families. Unfortunately, the families are stupid and malicious enough to bring dogs with them, and just abandon the dogs at the end of the summer! We see one such family doing precisely this at the opening of the movie.

With a whole bunch of families having decided to do this, the result is that there are a whole bunch of stray dogs that have turned fearl, and are now a pack working together. From here, it's not too difficult to figure out the plot of the movie, and what's going to happen next.

Compounding the issue is that two of the residents have their own dogs that are not part of the pack. One is Jerry and his family, and the other is a man who's picked this island because he's a sort of hermit. Unfortunately, the dogs are able to break into his house and kill him. When Jerry and the others on the island discover this, they realize that they all have to team up to try to solve the problem together and so that there's only one point of attack.

Having said that, some of the characters still do some pretty stupid horror movie trope things, such as exit Jerry's house when they really shouldn't. There's also the Gilligan's Island trope of help coming close, but the folks on the island not being able to get those off-islanders to understand that there are people on the island who really need help.

So, there's not much of a review of The Pack, in many ways because it is so thoroughly unoriginal. All of this sort of material has been done before, whether it be mutant bunnies in Night of the Lepus or Killer Shrews. That's not to say that The Pack is a bad movie. If you want a movie to sit down with friends and a bowl of popcorn and not have to think too hard, The Pack will certainly fit that bill. But it's all so predictable.