The Pack [DVD]

Emilie Dequenne makes an impulsive and gutsier heroine than normal, and acts as a bit of a trouble-magnet in this very enjoyable little gem. Warming to her hitch-hiker passenger, she's baffled when he disappears in a shabby roadside diner and returns to investigate. As usual in films of this kind, curiosity turns out to be a bad habit...
The characters are enjoyable and very watchable, from brutally practical matriarch La Spack, to Phillipe Nahon's oddball retired detective, through to the thoughtful hitch-hiker and the biker-gang trio who largely act as comic relief.
When the freaks come out to play, their reveal is intruiging and creepy, the properly executed stuff of weird horror nightmares, and the legend behind them is equally creepy. They themselves are hideous and freakish, and they make for a great relentless enemy.
Nearly everybody in the movie has a secret, and it's never short of intruigue. The only slightly lazy point is the inclusion of a character who's just obvious 'cannon fodder'. Consistently interesting, it's shot in bleak colours, has a tatty, run-down design to everything, and feels just real enough to be alarming. The gore is copious and well executed, and the tension is great. It even has perhaps the best '70s style cover I've seen in years.
Highly recommended.

I saw The Pack (La Meute) at my local horror festival last October and have been patiently waiting for a dvd release and yes now it's here (released in the morning here in U.K.) I will be 1st in to my local HMV in the morning to pick my copy up. La Meute is the latest on the new-wave French horror scene and although i dont think it's as good as Inside or Switchblade Romance (High Tension) it's definetly not far behind and i must say it's something fresh and different as we've come to expect from our cousins over the channel. La Meute is about a girl traveling across country and picks up a good looking hitchhiker (Not a good start if you want to live) and they go to a grotty diner in the middle of nowhere and the young woman gets kidnapped by the diner owner La Spack and then is put through torture before being La Spack attempts to served her up as a snack to The Pack. I'm a massive French horror fan , i have lots of stuff that is French made from the obvious big boys like Inside , Frontier(s) and High Tension to the lesser known ones that are still good like Sheitan (Satan) , A Childs Game , Prey , Caged , the list could go on forever and i know i'm on to a winner with The Pack , it's moody , suspenseful , funny , gory and just outright great fun. The Pack is highly recommended and does star Phillipe Nahon who was the creepy serial killer in High Tension so that just makes it extra cool for me.

Look out for the crazy biker gang , they are funny and just lighten the tone a little , look like they just left the Tittie Twister in From Dusk til Dawn which i think they got inspiration from for little bits of this film , it's also like 2 different films as the tone changes half way through similar to Rodriguez' vampire opus.

If I had known beforehand that this was a French horror film, I probably wouldn't have watched The Pack. Oh, the French try to make horror films, but they always seem to insist upon filling them with all kinds of weird abstractions and a brooding aura of pseudo-intellectual thought. Watching one of these films usually feels like watching a 90-minute version of one of those nonsensical Calvin Klein ads from a few years ago -- except there's a lot more blood. Dialogue seems to be treated as a necessary evil to be used as little as possible. It's too bad because there are some pretty sick freaks making French horror movies. Unfortunately, even a gore fest like The Pack leaves me feeling like I'm supposed to do some kind of deconstructive analysis of the central motif for a film class, and that's a feeling that is not conducive at all with enjoyment.

We start with young Charlotte Massot (Emilie Dequenne) who's taking an extended road trip in a beat-up station wagon for no apparent reason. She wears a leather jacket and smokes, so she's probably meant to symbolize some kind of alienation from modern society or something. In any event, needing a buffer between herself and a trio of disgusting old bikers chasing her tail, she decides to pick up a hitchhiker. He eventually leads them to a disgusting little bar in the middle of some trailer park, whereupon he goes to the bathroom and never comes back. Even though she barely knows the guy, Charlotte never even thinks about leaving; no, she waits around until the middle of the night, so she can break into the bar and search for him behind a hidden door in the bathroom. Big mistake. Really big mistake. Thus begins a nightmare scenario that might be a little frightening if it weren't so darned French. What happens to this poor girl may not be exactly what you're expecting, though, which is about the only good thing I can say about the rest of the movie. I take that back - the special effects makeup was pretty good, too.

Not unexpectedly, there is virtually no character development in the film, and we're apparently just supposed to accept the most unnatural of circumstances without question. I guess I'm not supposed to wonder why so many characters make so many stupid decisions, either - and that's fine because I could hardly care less about any one of them. As with most of the French horror films I've seen, I think you'd need to be morbidly depressed in order to have the slightest chance of enjoying The Pack.