BREEDERS (1986)
**1/2
Despite it’s sweeping and utter ineptness, it’s failure to illicit scares - or even basic laughter, it’s frighteningly sexist point of view, and the fact that it is more aggravating than listening to Uncle Mortichi’s post dinner sleep apnea fits, Breeders holds a special, squishy, warmishly tepid place in my heart. Why? Pure and simple nostalgia. As a snot-nosed adolescent and rental store junkie I first cut my horror teeth on this and better efforts like John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 (list continues ad naseum). It was B-grade creature features like these that taught me to embrace the monster in the closet (and my flagrant night terrors). The ritualistic acts of horror movie endurance usually took place in the darkly lit bedroom of my lumberjack-in-training best friend Brandon Kemp, far away from the Disney-fied tube of my peace-and-love parents. (My father called our forbidden films “Liver Movies” because in his mind the most they amounted too were livers being excised from their sanctified bodies and being flung across the screen where they would hopefully make an impressive splat. He wasn’t far off the money. [There were a fair amount of intestines flung around too.])
During these late nights romps into the terrain of true mondo celluloid I would endure these dismemberments, decapitations, and disembowelments by the hands of goofy looking dudes in big rubber monster suits. I would be sickened by the gore and make loud lamentations, spewing the “Killer Movies Create Killers” rhetoric of folks like Hilary Clinton, although secretly loving the forbidden carnage that was unfolding on the small screen. I would pop furtive embarrassing teenage boners at the unending parade of bare breasted babes terrorized by slashers, ghosts, & swamp things. I would be incessantly tormented by Brandon whose proclivity for scaring the shit out of me knew no bounds. I would become the fanboy geek you spy today.
And Breeders was my induction into the world of B-movies. Re-watching it nearly thirteen years later the warm fuzzy feeling fades a bit. This was one of the ones that started it all?! It doesn’t even make logical sense. “Plot holes big enough for an elephant to fall through” says that original movie-watching partner and still best friend, Brandon Kemp, now grown up, his lumberjack days behind him, and living in Berkley CA. (Oh, how times change.)
The brave fool who is older than 14 years of age (really the only age in which this movie can be even slightly recommended) can expect the following from Breeders:
* A ludicrous plot concerning an abducted women in glittery S&M attire crash landing in a meteor at an all girls school where she carries the eggs of a rubber suited monster. She barfs out the eggs, hypnotized women eat the eggs. Badda bing badda boom, lascivious zombie hell vixens.
* Some incredibly awful early CGI that looks, for all intents and purposes, like watching your buddy play Star Fox on Nintendo 64.
* An above-average monster from Stan Winston resembling Pumpkinhead on steroids.
* A Boston campus where everybody speaks with a different accent, none of them Bostonian. (Note to the Filmmaker: Though it’s called New England, nobody speaks with an English accent there.)
* The zombie hell vixens being blown away by big guns impervious to the effects of water submergence despite the fact that they can all be turned back by the simple removal of a necklace!
* A Tinto Bass-esque obsession with the posterior end. (Yes, it’s a bit of an ass flick)
* One of the most unflattering depictions of femininity ever to grace the direct-to-video screen. Seriously the women in this movie can’t do any damn thing and only serve to sexually gratify the men and scream at rats! It’s like Fox News teamed up with the Sci-Fi channel to collectively vomit out a tired schema replete with big guns and meteors!
And that’s about all you can safely expect. Talking about the movie is much more enjoyable than watching it. So with a grateful heart I bid Breeders adieu for the final time. I mean it, I ain’t watching this fuckin’ movie again.
Unless…
- Jasper Oliver
June 7, 2009
One Comment on “BREEDERS (1986)”
Comment:
June 8th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
It has been brought to my attention that the correct spelling of Italian ass-man auteur’s name is Tinto Brass (with an r), also that I overuse parnatheticals. Oh well.