Riele Downs Archives – CULTURE MIX

Review: ‘A Breed Apart’ (2025), starring Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Riele Downs, Zak Steiner, Page Kennedy, Joey Bragg, Troy Gentile and Hayden Panettiere

May 24, 2025

by Carla Hay

Joey Bragg, Troy Gentile, Riele Downs, Page Kennedy and Grace Caroline Currey in “A Breed Apart” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

“A Breed Apart” (2025)

Directed by Griff Furst and Nathan Furst (also known as The Furst Brothers)

Some language in Spanish with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed Latin American island, the horror comedy film “A Breed Apart” (inspired by the 2006 horror comedy “The Breed”) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some Latin people and African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Five social media influencers are invited to an island to train wild dogs and make them adoptable, in a contest to win ownership of the island, but the dogs go on a homicidal rampage.

Culture Audience: “A Breed Apart” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching bottom-of-the-barrel terrible horror movies.

Grace Caroline Currey in “A Breed Apart” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

“A Breed Apart” is an aggressively loathsome horror comedy about annoying people trapped on an island with killer dogs that attack. This sloppily made film, which is incompetent on every level, is a relentless attack on viewers’ intelligence and time. This isn’t the type of movie that is so bad, it’s amusing. This is the type of movie that is so bad, it’s an endurance test to get to the end because there’s nothing enjoyable about watching this repulsive garbage. The shaky cameras, manic film editing, and obnoxiously loud sound editing might also cause some sensitive viewers to become nauseated just from watching this dreadful cinematic slop.

Written and directed by Griff Furst and Nathan Furst (also known as the Furst Brothers), “A Breed Apart” takes place on an unnamed remote and private island in Latin America. The movie was actually filmed in Guatemala, but most of the characters in the film are American. “A Breed Apart” is inspired by the 2006 horror comedy film “The Breed” (directed by Nicholas Mastandrea), which was about five college students who go to a remote island to party—only to find out that the island is populated by killer dogs.

“A Breed Apart” begins by showing a flashback to 15 years before the main story takes place. On the set of a movie that is being filmed on this island, it’s nighttime. An actress named Hayden Hearst (played by Hayden Panettiere) is being pressured to do a scene where the unnamed director (played by Griff Furst) wants to cover her in pig’s blood and then act in a scene that will simulate Hayden being attacked by dogs.

Hayden tells the director that she’s doesn’t want to do the scene that way because it’s not how the scene was rehearsed. She’s also concerned that someone on the crew lost a finger from when the dogs attacked. The director assures Hayden that everything will be under control.

Meanwhile, the movie’s chief dog wrangler Maria (played by Lourdes Chavez) is alarmed because two of the dogs (named Montoya and Tango) that are supposed to be in this attack scene have gone missing. Maria is also the owner of the dogs (mostly German Shepherds) that are being used for this movie. The dogs are kept in a kennel area on the island.

Maria tries to get another dog wrangler named Marco (played by Isaac Flores) to go with her to look for the dogs. At first, Marco refuses but then changes his mind. Maria goes into a cave area with a flashlight and is startled when several bats fly out of the cave. She soon finds Montoya with a bat stuck to the dog’s face. Maria use a baseball bat to strike the animal bat off of the dog.

But then, another dog attacks Maria and drags her away with his teeth. Marco dies after a dog chomps on Marco’s groin. Another dog wrangler named Hector (played by Javier Melgar Santoveña) gets attacked and killed when a dog crashes through the front window of a vehicle when Hector tries to get away. None of this is spoiler information because the movie’s trailer gives away a lot of what happens in “A Breed Apart.”

The movie implies that the bats in the cave have somehow infected the dogs that are on the loose. But there are no realistic symptoms of rabies in these dogs, such as excessive drooling, staggering or paralysis, The dogs shown in the movie can be calm one minute, and then homicidal maniacs within seconds. They also move very swiftly, with no signs that they have a disease.

Could these dogs be vampires? No, because they don’t fit descriptions from vampire lore of only being able to function at night. Most of the carnage in the movie happens during the day. And the dogs’ murder victims don’t become vampires but stay dead. In other words, “A Breed Apart” is a poorly conceived movie that just shows a bunch of dog attacks with terrible visual effects and no real origin story for why the dogs have become serial killers of humans.

Fifteen years after these killings on the movie set where the dogs went on a rampage, it’s mentioned that the movie was never completed. The island became abandoned shortly afterward. Only the dogs remained on the island. It’s a stupid scenario, because in real life, killer dogs would be captured and undergo euthanasia or would be killed in other ways.

A sleazy TV producer named Vince Ventura (played by Joey Bragg) comes up with the idea to have a contest where five social media influencers are invited to this island to tame the dogs and make them adoptable. The person who can make the most dogs adoptable gets to win ownership of the island, which is a prize valued at about $1 million. All of the influencers accept the invitation and travel by boat to the island.

Of course, “A Breed Apart” is so idiotic, it doesn’t really explain why Vince has the authority to hand over the deed to this supposedly abandoned island. It’s never made clear if he’s the rightful owner or not, but he has decorated part of the island and called it Vincetopia. Vince works with an assistant producer named Thalia (played by Virginia Gardner), who does whatever Vince tells her to do and is fully on board with this plan. This contest is supposed to be filmed for an eight-episode reality TV series, by there is no TV crew in sight.

These are the five social media influencers who are invited to the island:

Violet (played by Caroline Grace Currey) has a social media channel with her brother called the Shenanigan Siblings, where they do silly stunts, such as having her brother stand behind Violet, as he feeds cake to her while she has her hands behind her back. Violet is very cynical and almost embarrassed about the work she does on social media. She also thinks most social media influencers are morons.
Violet’s brother Collins (played Zak Steiner) is a good-looking dolt who loves being on social media and is constantly thinking up gimmicks in attempts to get more views and more subscribers.
Killer Queen, also known as KQ (played by Riele Downs), does stunts using do-it-yourself toolkits.
Big Farmer Jay (played by Page Kennedy) lives on a farm and does stunts involving farm animals.
Mason Kelly (played by Troy Gentile) is a dork whose online persona is being a stereotypical party-loving playboy.

None of the people in “A Breed Apart” comes close to being likable or interesting. Fans of the 2022 movie thriller “Fall” (about two women trapped on a decommissioned 2,000-foot tower that they’ve climbed on a dare) will be disappointed that “Fall” co-stars Currey and Gardner have reunited for the woefully inferior “A Breed Apart.” “Fall” was able to get a lot of realistic suspense from a story that has only a few locations. There’s no suspense in “A Breed Apart,” which is mind-numbing in how many scenes look fake due to the tacky visual effects, horrible editing, atrocious dialogue and cringeworthy acting.

“A Breed Apart” is the type of cinematic junk where, during chase scenes, people who were several miles away suddenly show up in ways that wouldn’t be possible unless they could travel at the speed of light. There’s a scene that takes place on a boat where a severely wounded person who was left behind on the island suddenly appears on the boat, with no explanation for how this person got on the boat. And the computer-generated-image (CGI) dogs are so phony-looking, this botched filmmaking is distracting and ruins any intended thrills or scares. Real dogs and puppet dogs were also used in the movie and don’t look any better.

Panettiere (a former star of the TV series “Nashville” and “Heroes”) shares top billing in “A Breed Apart,” but it’s a bait-and-switch fraud because her screen time is no more than 15 minutes in this 100-minute movie. The character of Hayden Hearst shows up on the island 15 years after the movie she was in was shut down. The filmmaking in “A Breed Apart” is so inept, the filmmakers didn’t bother to make Hayden Hearst look any different from how she looked 15 years earlier. “A Breed Apart” is such a detestable movie experience, shoveling dog crap could be considered more entertaining and a more productive use of someone’s time.

Lionsgate released “A Breed Apart” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on May 16, 2025.

Review: ‘Darby and the Dead,’ starring Riele Downs and Auli’i Cravalho

January 2, 2023

by Carla Hay

“Darby and the Dead”

Directed by Silas Howard

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the fantasy comedy film “Darby and the Dead” features a racially diverse cast of characters (African American, white, Asian and Latino) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: After a popular but snobby girl in high school dies in a freak accident, she returns as a ghost to haunt her psychic former best friend to throw a tribute party for her, and the former friend goes from being a social outcast to being the most popular student in the school.

Culture Audience: “Darby and the Dead” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching teen comedies that are “dumbed down” for audiences, and lazily mix together plots that were in superior movies.

Riele Downs, Asher Angel and Auli’i Cravalho in “Darby and the Dead” (Photo by Marcos Cruz/20th Century Studios/Hulu)

The cringeworthy comedy “Darby and the Dead” is as fresh and funny as a rotting corpse. This dreadful dud relentlessly insults its characters and viewers, as it clumsily rips off ideas from better movies. It’s easy to see why 20th Century Studios dumped “Darby and the Dead” on a streaming service instead of releasing the movie in theaters: “Darby and the Dead” is the type of awful movie that viewers would want refunds for if they had the misfortune of buying movie tickets for it.

Directed by Silas Howard, “Darby and the Dead” (written by Becca Greene and Wenonah Wilms) was originally titled “Darby Harper Wants You to Know.” It’s about a psychic teenage girl who can see dead people and is then haunted by a former best friend while they argue about issues having to do with cliques and popularity at their high school. You don’t have to be a psychic to know that this subject matter has been so overdone with predictable endings in comedy films about teenagers, any movie with the same concept has do something special to stand out from the forgettable mediocrity of most of these formulaic teen films.

Unfortunately, everything about “Darby and the Dead” looks like it was made by out-of-touch adults who took the cheesiest aspects of teen comedies from the 1980s and 1990s and just shoveled it into “Darby and the Dead” while making a few technological updates for the early 2020s. “Darby and the Dead” has the benefit of some talented cast members, but they don’t have believable chemistry as friends or enemies in the movie. In “Darby and the Dead,” they look exactly like what they are: cast members in their 20s pretending to be teens in high school and trying too hard to be comical while saying their very unfunny lines of dialogue.

The title character of “Darby and the Dead” is Darby Harper (played Riele Downs), a sarcastic loner, who’s about 16 or 17 years old. Darby is also a psychic who lives with her widowed father Ben (played by Derek Luke) in an unnamed U.S. city. (“Darby and the Dead” was actually filmed in South Africa.) Darby’s constant voiceover narration gets annoying after a while, because what she thinks are witty observations are actually just dull rants from a teenager who doesn’t want to admit that she’s bitter about her life.

When she was 7 years old, Darby (played by Milan Maphike) witnessed her mother (played by Kim Syster) drown while they were both swimming in an ocean. The movie also shows a brief flashback of Darby (played by Emily Maphike), when Darby was about 13 or 14 years old. “I was never the same,” Darby explains about how the death of her mother changed Darby. “I see dead people everywhere. The dead needed my help.” Darby says she turned her back on the living world and started what she calls her “side hustle: counseling dead people.”

She calls herself a “spiritual messenger, of sorts” and the ghosts who still haunt Earth have “unfinished business.” Darby further explains what happened to the ghosts who received her help: “Spirits were able to cross over, which is pretty beautiful. Word spread in the purgatory circuit, and my after-school job took off. There’s no pay, but if dead people’s gratitude had value, I’d be [Amazon’s billionaire founder] Jeff Bezos.”

Now that it’s been established that Darby has such a huge ego, she thinks she’s the Jeff Bezos of the ghost world, Darby becomes quite insufferable for much of the movie, as she shows a mixture of self-pity and arrogance about being a pariah at her high school. On the one hand, Darby likes to brag about how she thinks she’s too smart and too special to mingle with the common people who go to her high school. On the other hand, it’s obvious that she desperately craves their approval.

One of the reasons why she’s treated like an outsider is that anti-social Darby talks out loud to the ghosts that no one else can see. Therefore, people wonder if Darby has some type of mental illness. When it comes to being shunned by her peers, Darby also puts a lot of blame on her former best friend Capri Donohue (played by Auli’i Cravalho), who is a classmate of Darby’s at Frederick Douglass High School. Darby says in a voicever that Capri is the “head phony” at the school, which Darby calls “a torturous realm, where I am forced to spend my days.”

Capri is currently the queen bee of the most popular clique in school. Capri’s three subservient sidekicks are Bree (played by Genneya Walton), Taylor (played by Kylie Liya Page) and Piper (played by Nicole Maines), whose personalities are indistinguishable from each other. Because Darby has a reputation for being weird, Capri ended their friendship. Capri and her “mean girls” clique also ridicule and insult Darby any chance that they can get.

Adding to the animosity between the two ex-pals is (teen comedy cliché alert) they both want to date the same guy. His name is James Harris (played by Asher Angel, in a generic teen boyfriend role), whom Darby describes as a “band geek” she’s had a crush on since sixth grade. However, when James went on “The Voice” TV talent show as a contestant and had his 15 minutes of fame, Capri suddenly took an interest in him, turned on the charm, and now Capri and James are dating each other. James has fallen hard for Capri, but Capri is not nearly as smitten. Capri is interested in James as long as she thinks that dating him will boost her popularity.

Meanwhile (teen comedy cliché alert), a new transfer student named Alex (played by Chosen Jacobs) arrives at the school. Principal Morgan (played by Anthony Oseyemi) tells Darby, of all people, to be Alex’s study buddy in school. It’s quite the unrealistic, meddling reach for a school principal to order a student to be a study buddy for another student who just transferred to the school. Alex is friendly, a little nerdy, and he likes a lot of the same entertainment and literature that Darby likes. And you know what that means.

Maybe the “Darby and the Dead” filmmakers didn’t want to use the tired teen-comedy stereotype of making two potential love interests get assigned by a teacher to be study partners, usually in a biology class. However, by having the school principal force this partnership, it just looks even phonier. At any rate, as soon as Alex meets Darby, and she is rude and standoffish to him, you know exactly what’s going to happen between these two characters later in the movie.

While Darby has voiceover rants about how Capri and her friends are horrendous snobs, Darby doesn’t see the irony that she is almost equally unpleasant and snooty to Alex when she rebuffs his attempts to become her friend. “I’m a lone wolf,” Darby curtly tells Alex. The off-putting tone of “Darby and the Dead” is that viewers are supposed to automatically love Darby’s rudeness because she’s the “underdog” of the story. However, Darby is such a terribly written character (she says multiple times she doesn’t like being around people who are still alive), there’s no good reason to root for her for most of the story.

As part of Darby’s “spiritual guidance” counseling sessions, “Darby and the Dead” has some awkward filler of Darby hanging out with two old men (who are both dead) that is embarrassing to everyone in these movie scenes. A better movie would have had more variety in the types of ghosts that Darby helps, but that would involve creative imagination, which “Darby and the Dead” sorely lacks. It actually comes across as a little creepy that these dead old men have gravitated to this underage teen.

Gary (played by Tony Danza) is a dead janitor who used to work at the high school, but he hasn’t passed on to the other side. He’s waiting for his widow to die and join him, so they can cross over to the other side of the spirit world together. There’s a stupid scene of Darby talking to Gary on the school bleachers, and he gives Darby some cash to pass on to his widow. This scene is as bad as it sounds.

Even worse: Gary introduces Darby to his dead friend Mel (played by Wayne Knight), who died of a heart attack but has not crossed over the other side yet. Mel’s wife died 17 years earlier. Mel is concerned that when he dies, his wife will see him in the body that Mel has now: older and with a lot more weight gain, compared to 17 years ago. Darby assures Mel that when he passes on to the next realm to reunite with his dead wife, Mel will be his “optimal self” (whatever that means). So now, viewers know that not only does Darby think she’s the Jeff Bezos of the ghost world, she also thinks she’s a makeover guru for the ghost world.

Capri’s death doesn’t happen until almost halfway through the movie, which takes entirely too long to get to this plot development, considering “Darby and the Dead” is marketed as a movie that’s mostly about what happens after Capri dies. Capri’s death is another badly written, phony-looking scene: In a school locker room, Capri is holding a plugged-in, hairstyling iron after stealing Darby’s clothes in a bullying incident. Capri accidentally falls down in a shallow body of water while holding the iron, she gets electrocuted, and dies.

You already know what’s going to happen next: Capri won’t cross over into the other realm, Darby can see Capri’s ghost, and the two teens spend a lot of time bickering and getting on each other’s nerves. Capri’s “unfinished business” is that she died before she could have her Sweet 17 birthday party extravaganza. Capri makes a deal with Darby: Capri will leave Darby alone if Darby turns the birthday party into a special tribute for Capri, and Capri will teach Darby how to become the most popular girl in school.

What about Capri’s boyfriend James? “Darby and the Dead” has more terribly staged scenarios over this love triangle. And let’s not forget Alex, who is waiting around and hoping that Darby will wake up and see that Alex is a much better match for her. There are absolutely no surprises in “Darby and the Dead,” which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the movie makes it all so boring and witless.

Downs isn’t horrible in the role of Darby. She’s just been saddled with a horrible script, and she’s just not able to make grumpy Darby all that endearing for most of the movie. There’s only so much whining and pouting that viewers can take from Darby, a teenager who’s actually fairly privileged and is, by her own admission, anti-social by choice.

Cravalho, who’s best known as a singer, might excel in musical roles, such as her voice-starring title role in Disney’s 2016 animated film “Moana.” However, live-action comedy doesn’t appear to be a strong suit for Cravalho, who is too hammy in “Darby and the Dead,” and she needs to work on her comedic timing. Not only is Capri dead for most of the movie, but Capri also has a dead personality. Cravalho tries too hard to be campy in this role, and her performance just doesn’t work well for how this mean-spirited and soulless character is written.

The rest of the cast members are serviceable and don’t do anything special. “Darby and the Dead” fails to impress as a movie that can portray teenagers in ways other than the usual, narrow movie stereotypes. To rephrase the title of a Nirvana song, the teen spirit in “Darby of the Dead” smells like bad filmmaking.

Hulu premiered “Darby and the Dead” on December 2, 2022.