It should be enough to merely state that Tim Kincaid’s Breeders is the progeny of an individual whose canon is largely comprised of direct-to-video productions. Sadly, this isn’t enough. What makes this particular film especially decrepit is that fact it holds the honor of being one of the early works by the director, thus the implication is to be had–via the old adage that the more experience and exposure one has with a trade, the more proficient one becomes–that Breeders is really bad. What else can be said of a filmmaker whose resume contains titles which frequently incorporate the terms “cop” or “sex”?
When a slew of rape victims is admitted into the Manhattan General Hospital in a matter of only a few days, Doctor Gamble Pace (Teresa Farley) and Detective Dale Andriotti (Lance Lewman) believe they are onto something at the discovery that each patient was a virgin prior to her assault. Testing their critical acumen is the presence of an organically-based acidic compound alongside each subject. Just as the duo uncover what they hope to be a potentially conclusive piece of evidence, the victims mysteriously rise from their beds and begin to saunter into the facility’s basement.
Kincaid does establish two precedents during his feature: One, the highly imaginative notion that all but snaps the rope upon which our suspension of disbelief hangs: There are, not only one, but several virgins (plural) in New York. (This parallels the highly insightful piece of 411 that every girl in Manhattan, the borough in which undergarments are apparently vastly underrated, is a brunette, whether or not she wants to believe so while, nevertheless, bad tan lines accentuate the said fact.) Two, shear and utter thematic incongruity. Breeders’s premise is the doppelganger to the Puritanical cautionary tale of horror lore. Instead of the innocent prevailing due to unrepentant, diligent allegiance to upstanding virtue, Kincaid inverts the horror cliché, albeit to contradictory ends along the way, by refusing to offer a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card to members of the Chastity Coalition. He casts this alongside the gaggle of vestal caricatures, many of which espouse the motive for their celibacy as being due to the rampant nature of S.T.D.s which all but hold major offices in the City. Ergo, such individuals wouldn’t be sexually naïve if the playfield were free from debris. Interestingly enough, though admittedly on a head-slapping note, the antagonist’s choice of victims is based on much the same principle. Talk of your thematic confusion . . . .
To be honest, Kincaid didn’t let the burden of story weigh upon him too heavily for his agenda is quite clear: To skirt the line between soft porn and horror so as to be able to market under both labels simultaneously. What results falls just a smidge shy of Stephen Apostolof’s Orgy of the Dead. And speaking of Ed Wood (who scripted Apostolof’s notorious ditty), Kincaid seems to have somehow successfully channeled the God of the B-Movie Fiasco during each of every stage of Breeders. From the acting, casting, dialogue, lighting, sound, direction, and premise, all the way down to the gratuitous nature of the gore and nudity, the director somehow manages to posit an unintentional homage to both Wood’s early sci-fi horror era as well as his latter porn period.
Neither Farley or Lewman fail to appear old enough for the roles in which they are cast any more than they attempt to compensate for such by way of acting. As the former reads from cue cards as we lean closer to the screen in hopes of deciphering what is being muttered amid an echo which is present in every other shooting locale, we are alternately issued a reprieve from the blinding glare in the previous scene by the subsequent black hole of the next. This amid a bastion of stagnate frames, the only relief from which dependably arrives at the appearance of a boob or a bludgeoning which the camera undoubtedly lingers upon in order to prohibit any benefit of the doubt in respect to the director’s intents in respect to overt gratuity. By comparison, only Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls usurps Kincaid in the shear number of mammy glands in a motion picture though the German filmmaker had the good sense to hire a handful of girls with bra sizes larger than an A cup. This says nothing of the synapses-inducing logistics in respect to the dialogue, which is perhaps best represented in “You’re alive. If you’re alive, you can remember. If you can remember, we can find him.” Lastly, the junior high-caliber of the special effects comes second only to the ever dependable horror cliché of blood seeping from the mouth automatically, conclusively signaling death.
None of this is meant to imply that Breeders is as fun as a Wood production despite the inadvertent humor in a sign which states “Empire State Building / Basement Deliveries” in a picture involving rape. In short, Tim Kincaid’s feature is an exercise in exploitive tedium which a coven of virgins bathing in pool of alien semen can’t succeed in salvaging. At the end of the day, what the filmmaker accomplishes is fashioning an underdog entry in a field fraught with contenders as Breeders competes for the trophy of Worst Horror Film of the 1980s
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
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- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
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