First time writer/director, Frank Richard, crafts a meticulous, tension-filled horror with a striking score and impressive chills...for the first half of the film. Managing a hefty dose of funny one-liners, The Pack opens with quite a few chuckles, solid acting, and an intriguing, if somewhat overly familiar plot.

We follow Charlotte (Emilie Dequenne, delivering a feisty, believable performance) on the road to nowhere – when her collection of CDs finish, it's the end of the line. On her travels she picks up a scraggy lookin' fella on the side of the road, Max (Benjamin Biolay); they stop off at a scraggy lookin' truck-stop diner. Things soon turn sour when Max goes missing and Charlotte believes the bartender, La Spack (Yolande Moreau, in a scene-stealing role) has something to do with it. Snooping around after hours lands Charlotte in a worst-case scenario: caged beside a man who believes he's John Wayne. (No, really.) She's chow for La Spack's children... mutant children!

Unfortunately, once the supernatural elements come into play, the film tackles quite a few sub-genres of horror, never quite managing to find its own distinct take on the monster-movie subclass, resulting in a vampire-werewolf-ish-Voldemort-looking-zombie tale. From a visual standpoint, they look impressive, but there's never really any explanation as to their existence, you simply have to roll with it. Since there's no ground rules to speak of, I found myself baffled by their sudden appearance in the film: they can only rise during a full moon, but they need blood in order to survive; they very much look like vampires although they were never bitten while they were alive, so technically they're zombies. The scares are generic and ineffective, and I think I was too busy figuring out what exactly I was meant to be afraid of to fully register any of the jolting moments. Purely from a blood and guts perspective though, there's more than enough here for gore-hounds and the prosthetic work is fairly impressive, too.

It's not all limp scares and questionable monster mash-ups. As I mentioned above, the film does start off with a confident swagger and likeable characters (even the bad guys). While it's fairly tame compared to later on in the film, due to some impressive directing and uncomfortable use of sound, there's a continuous sense of dread that looms over the proceedings making for a surreal blend of Hostel-styled, hillbilly antics that somehow manages to work. I think had the film kept the monster reveal until the very end, and limited it to just one of the creatures, it very well may have worked. But it doesn't and as a result certain character decisions feel forced and there's simply no time for an explanation, the film suddenly switches gears and struggles forward.

The end result is a very good looking mixed bag of a film. Technically, it's hard to fault Richard, it's just a pity the writing isn't quite up to scratch; and once the vampire-zombies begin to tear appendages apart like Christmas crackers pacing also becomes a serious issue.

Not awful by any means, but not quite what I was expecting either. Because the film is tonally all over the place, it's difficult to openly recommend this to casual horror fans. For French horror enthusiasts only.

  -- Mark Ritchie