A BREED APART - Mark Reviews Movies

A Breed Apart, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 15, 2025

It's difficult to determine the true target of the mockery of A Breed Apart. On the surface, the movie, written and directed by the Furst Brothers (Griff and Nathan), satirizes the view-count-obsessed breed of social media influencers and creators, even making the dummy who puts everyone in such unnecessary peril a fairly recognizable beast of an online personality.

On another level, the movie might be making fun of itself as an obviously cheap and cheesy sort of creature feature. We've seen these kinds of before (most notably involving shark-based weather phenomena and birds signaling the climate crisis)—ones that are just self-aware enough of their gimmicky premises and technical shortcomings that we're left to wonder if they're intentionally bad to be funny or just downright bad movies.

There's a good reason, though, to believe that we're being mocked here. Once the promisingly stupid setup is presented and the script reveals that it just plans to run the same jokes into the ground over and over, there's really not much left to this allegedly comedic excuse of a supposed thriller about a group of self-involved online personalities being hunted by wild dogs on a remote island. Yes, that sounds like a funny idea, but don't let that fool you. This is an ugly-looking, repetitive, and dull dead end of whatever it is the movie is trying to be.

The extended prologue, set about 15 years before the main plot, drags out the setup for some unknowable reason. We learn that an action movie starring Hayden Hearst (Hayden Panettiere) was meant to use dogs for some sequence, but before the crew could shoot the scene, one of the dogs got loose, was bitten by a bat, and somehow transferred, not rabies, but some kind of ferality to its canine co-stars. The dog handlers are all killed in a scene that generously steals—or pays homage to, if one is feeling as generous—from a legitimately great example of a creature feature. Someone wants the title of that film, which revolved around dinosaurs on a remote island hunting a lot of people, connected to this one in a review, but it's not happening in this one.

The rest of the movie takes some other scenes, as well as a lot of sound effects, from that other film, too, as brother-and-sister online video creators Violet (Grace Caroline Currey) and Collins (Zak Steiner) are invited to that island in the present day along with three other internet influencers. The man behind the plan to create a non-specific reality competition show on the island is Vince Ventura (Joey Bragg), who wants to create an elaborate and technologically improbable sanctuary for the island's dog inhabitants.

Before any of that can come to pass, Vince has his throat ripped out by one of the dogs, leaving Violet and Collins to try to survive along with inventor Queen (Riele Downs), farm-based rapper Big Farmer Jay (Page Kennedy), cryptocurrency bro Mason (Troy Gentile), and Vince's assistant Thalia (Virginia Gardner). This amounts to a lot of bickering and bantering, until dogs suddenly and randomly pop into frame before and after the characters make increasingly dumb decisions.

That's the broad joke, of course—that these guys aren't prepared for or capable of dealing with a life-or-death situation, even though the movie depends on them living long enough to be put in jeopardy repeatedly. Considering that each of these characters has at least some distinct personality or skill, it's genuinely a shock that the screenplay can't even figure out a way to incorporate those characteristics or talents into this scenario. They yell at each other a lot and make jokes about how weird/wild/wacky it is that whatever just happened actually just happened. The script just repeats this process in different scenes of the characters evading or fighting back against the seemingly indestructible dogs.

Obviously, no one wants to see dogs be hurt, even if they're just computer-generated versions of the animals. That leaves some good news, because the visual effects are laughably bad. Again, such a decision might be part of whatever joke the filmmakers are going for here, but since nothing surrounding the digital dogs is amusing, we're just left to marvel at how unconvincing they look.

Some of the effects in later scenes of A Breed Apart especially have the soft, unnaturally fluid, and constantly inconsistent appearance of images "made" by artificial intelligence. While there doesn't seem to be anything in the credits to confirm that suspicion (We get outtakes beforehand, which at least let us know some of the cast had a good time), let's just use some practical assumptions. Like pornography or a genuinely bad movie such as this one, you know AI imagery when you see it.

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