Horror Challenge entry #6: The Pack (1977, Robert Clouse)
(Written for the Killer Animal Blogathon.)
When I announced this particular blogathon, I knew already which film I was going to view and write about. I’d love to say that I had a highfalutin’ reason for my conviction, but it was merely because I did a Robert Clouse flick for the last blogathon I participated in, and I liked the idea of keeping a bit of consistency. Too bad that didn’t really work out for me: Where Gymkata was mesmerizing in its utter wrongheaded idiocy, The Pack is merely dull. Yet there’s something there anyway that makes me glad I saw it, and I’ll get to that in a minute.
The pack in question is a sizable group of feral, possibly rabid dogs who start to wreak havoc on a remote island vacation spot. Joe Don Baker is the no-nonsense marine biologist who takes it upon himself to stop their reign of terror. That’s the film at its most basic, and that’s also the film at its most complex - it’s Joe Don Baker vs. killer canines, and it plays out precisely how you’d expect. There’s few surprises and little panache - Clouse’s idea of tension is filming most of the attack scenes in slow motion, and he’s clearly no director of actors, as most of the cast not named Joe Don Baker comes off as flat and declarative. (Richard B. Shull has a few good moments as well, but he’s mostly coasting on the snarky-but-trustworthy persona he also wore to better effect in Cockfighter and Hail.) There’s an early attack sequence on a woman in a Volkswagen that contains a dark, terrifying energy that points towards what the rest of this flaccid thing should be, but that energy quickly dissipates, not to be seen again until the effectively desperate final mano-a-mano in an attic between Baker and the snarling alpha dog.
The idea I got while watching this was that of a film where almost everyone involved put out the exact minimum of effort needed to drag this over the cinematic Mendoza Line and not a whit more. But, practically in spite of itself, there is something interesting about The Pack, and I don’t mean Baker’s always-satisfying strong-jawed asskicking. (Though that’s never to be discounted.) Most killer-animal films center around beasts that humans are instinctively afraid of; whether animals dangerous because of size and ferocity (i.e. lions in The Ghost and the Darkness, a bear in Grizzly) or because of skeeviness amplified by numbers and/or mutations (i.e. large rats in Deadly Eyes, flesh-eating cockroaches in The Nest), the assumption is that the threat is something we’d feel okay about killing. The Pack, then, travels somewhat thornier ground in that the threat is domestic dogs… and as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with cinematic cliches, it’s damn near verboten to kill a dog in a movie. To the extent that the film works at all, it works in the space between what the plot requires and what we fear we’ll actually see - we don’t normally expect dogs to be killed in movies, yet here’s a film that requires it as part of the plot fabric, so how to react? There’s several dog attacks in the film, but more unsettling than dog-on-human violence is the (well-simulated) dog-on-dog violence and human-on-dog violence. That doesn’t make the film any better, as the intellectual dissonance is endemic to the plot and not something the film really does anything with, but at least it provides something to chew on.
Horror Challenge entry #1: Frozen (2010, Adam Green)
Maybe this Green kid knows what he’s doing after all. Far removed from the jokey emptiness of Hatchet, Frozen is a taut, ruthless and dead serious bit of survival horror that wants us to care about what happens to its unfortunate characters. Myriad are the horror films where youngsters, privileged youngsters, do stupid stuff to deserve their fate and we in the audience agree. Rarer, and much harder to pull off, is the horror film where the main characters do stupid stuff to deserve their fate yet we hope they avoid it because the film works hard to make us see past their faults to the essential humanity underneath. That’s the strength of Frozen: It’s a combination of bad luck and the-rules-don’t-apply-to-us brazenness that gets three youths accidentally stranded on a powered-down ski lift, yet as the elements take their toll and guards get dropped, sympathy starts to creep in. Once that happens, it’s an easy jump to hoping for the best for these characters, which then means Green can start throwing gut punches. Exposure and rot, the fragility of flesh, place this as uncomfortably close to body-horror as a man-vs.-wild shock show can get, and each bodily failing is played for maximum impact (the blonde’s hand on the metal railing, for instance). A striking step in the right direction for a hopeful young talent; let’s hope this proves to be the rule and not the exception in his career. (Hatchet II seems a regression, though I haven’t seen it.)
