A group of twentysomething friends—shockingly there are five of them, two females and three males, and of the latter, one of them is a wisecracking black dude; this in itself ought to tell you all you need to know about the kind of movie you’re going to be watching—goes to a cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway. Oh, sorry. Not a cabin in the woods. A cabin on an island. Also on this island is a shuttered shady government research facility where they were doing experiments on fish, turning them into vicious killers. Oh, wait. No. That was PIRAHNA. This time, they were experimenting on dogs, and those pooches, having escaped the shuttered facility where no one was left behind to watch it (no one ever is), now roam the island killing any humans unfortunate enough to visit there.
THE BREED is as paint-by-numbers as they come. Once the action gets cranking it moves along well enough and is entertaining enough, but no foundation was laid that would have allowed for those scenes to play out in a more satisfying manner. To put it another way, you don’t care about the characters who are getting eaten, nor do you care how they will eventually get off the island.
Also, the dogs don’t look scary. It’s the bane of any killer dog movie; unless great pains are taken, as they were in, say, CUJO, to alter the dogs’ appearance, they don’t look scary. They look cute. You want to pet them. It’s hard to ratchet up the suspense when the audience only wants to pet your monsters.