A Breed Apart

Grade: D

For the third movie in a row, I’m left wondering what I just watched. I considered turning A Breed Apart off a few times, less than half an hour in. I would not have even watched it had it not been for the presence of Virginia Gardner in the cast. I’ve made it a tradition, for better or worse, to see all of her films since Fall. Like Hacked: A Double Entendre of Rage Fueled Karma, A Breed Apart is more like a feature-length TikTok than a real movie – and it’s even worse than Hacked.

The prologue takes place on a remote island, where an action movie is being filmed. I guess it features dogs, as there are several. One of them wanders off the set into a cave that is provocatively shaped. It looks like something. You’ll know it when you see it, IF you see it – but I don’t think you should. The dog is bitten by a bat, and becomes superhuman, or supercanine, if you will. It somehow transfers that supercanineness to the other dogs, making all of them into vicious, aggressive man-eaters. The movie never gets finished, everyone evacuates, and the location is abandoned.

15 years later, we get a setup like Glass Onion. A social media influencer, with an insanely nice homestead situation, invites a handful of people who are famous in the digital world to this very island. He has a sick idea for a reality show where these people try to take down all the dogs. The last one standing wins the deed to the island. A Breed Apart is basically Jurassic Park with dogs. I like to call it Jurass Is Bored and Annoyed.

The great Virginia Gardner plays the mustachioed orchestrator’s…co-host? Show partner? Girlfriend doesn’t seem likely, because she states that she doesn’t like guys. She speaks in trendy Generation Z buzzwords, and frequently has a Twizzler hanging out of her mouth like a toothpick or cigarette. A Breed Apart reunites her with her Fall co-star Grace Caroline Currey. Their characters in Fall climbed a 2,000 foot cell tower, and got trapped up there when the ladder broke off. In this movie, when Currey and Gardner observe two guys going up one to escape the dogs, they have this dialogue: “What idiot would climb up a cell phone tower?” “Somebody with a death wish, that’s for sure.” I appreciated the in-joke, but A Breed Apart has made so little noise, that this obvious reference has yet to make the movie’s IMDb trivia page. Maybe I’ll submit it.

There’s a low quality, and equally high quantity of stunningly sloppy AI and green screen, including a AI-ey shot of a snarling dog, that gets recycled over and over again. The ending is ludicrous, as the dogs are able to hold onto ropes and climb up boats. Inevitably, not everyone makes it to the end of the movie, including people of a certain race that’s notorious for dying first or early in films. When that happens, the survivors don’t seem to care. They just truck on, barely batting an eye. I sat through A Breed Apart. Can I be rewarded with a treat and a belly rub?

Grade: D