Dying Breed

Matt, (LEIGH WANNELL), and his Irish girlfriend, Nina, (MIRRAH FOULKES), accompany Matt’s friend, Jack, (NATHAN PHILLIPS), and HIS girlfriend Rebecca, (MELANIE VELLEJO), on a trip into the Tasmanian interior to hunt for Tasmanian tigers.

Nina has another motive; her older sister drowned on a similar search eight years earlier.

The locals, who are descendents of a cannibalistic convict known as The Pieman, aren’t exactly friendly.

The first requisite for a horror film which places young people in jeopardy is, you would have thought, to make us care about the characters so that when they’re in danger we share their distress. This is a notion alien to director Jody Dwyer and his co-screenwriters Michael Boughen and Rod Morris.

Jack is so odious and obnoxious that he forfeits any sympathy and Matt is a wimp. The women are marginally more interesting, but not enough to encourage you to invest in their plight.
So this poor man’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE fails on just about every level. It tries hard to be horrific and gruesome, even introducing a bit of fashionable torture near the end, but only the most credulous will find it genuinely scary.

I enjoy a really good horror film, but DYING BREED is an exceedingly feeble addition to the genre.