As I was watching The Breed, my question of whether or not the director had ever seen a movie was answered when two of his characters make mention of Bambi. Granted, this is issuing optimistic benefit of the doubt twice over in that 1) such could be due to the screenwriters’ insertion of the line or b) considering the fame of the Disney feature, a mere offhanded cultural note. Yet, to my dismay, Nicholas Mastandrea, prior to his career shift to challenging Uwe Boll as worst director working today, not only spent his life in cinema, but great cinema at that as he served as aides to both Wes Craven and George Romero, which leads me to only one conclusion: Mastandrea is blind, literally blind, lest how else could something not have rubbed off on him in the two-decades of celluloid experience and he still create something as abominable as The Breed?
Where to begin . . . ? For starters, and adding insult to injury considering who his mentor is (Craven being along for the ride as producer), is the by-the-numbers slasher flick we are presented with in a post-Scream world, a cinematic realm where, if such is not sardonically over the top or an homage to yesteryear, it rendered all but obsolete. I say slasher in lieu of our antagonist being canines but the format is all too familiar: A holiday getaway (from, natch, college) with obligatory drinking by typecast, stock characters (nerd, strong-arm, whore, tomboy, and token black guy used as the insulting comedic minstrel), who are forced to enter–where else?–the basement after a fuse blows. But wait. It’s not enough that we are being given more of the outdated same, but this occurs TWICE! TWICE! TWICE!!!
Moreover, amid the poor, poor direction, the non sequitur rationale of the characters all but has its audience begging for the characters’ early demises so as abridge the film’s beleaguered running time. For example, life and limb is risked one-and-a-half (don’t ask) times over as the stranded group attempts to allocate a car in a nearby shed. The problem herein lies that our collective is trapped on A DESERT ISLAND! Of course, as rote formula would have it, the damn thing won’t start since the hunk of tin seems to be the only thing in the film which knows it’s in a shitty horror film. And only in this Night of the Living Dead rip-off would we have a character axiomatically declare, “I didn’t know all of this would happen.” Well no shit Sherlock. However, given the aggregated IQs of the inbred group, such a line might be a necessary admission of innocence.
And then there’s the impossible scenarios, one following right after the other throughout the duration of the agonizing, suicide-inducing hour-and-a-half. As characters reappear, time and time again, after sure-death situations so as to keep the screen populated, a subplot involving a bite which is insinuated to be leading somewhere, only to be abruptly abandoned, is second only to how a marooned individual survives for two days on the isle of dog. The latter is a problem in that, given what we come to learn about the canines, subsisting alongside the furry ones for more than five minutes is a Herculean feature but, alas, the soon-to-be-dead figure keeps trudging along just long enough to issue a requisite foreboded warning.
So permit me to end here with Island of the Dogs, er, The Breed (the former is indubitably what the feature would have been dubbed if made 40 years prior), a title which does not relate to the contents of the feature what-so-freaking-ever (we get the impression that the director would have liked the more befitting “The Brood” but, given that David Cronenberg took the name decades ago . . . ), which symbolically represents the whole of Nicholas Mastandrea’s cinematic catastrophe, celluloid tripe so bad that it, without so much as a second-thought, ranks in my personal Top Ten unwatchable movies.
-Egregious Gurnow
This film provided by Cape Video, the premier supplier of hard-to-find and out-of-print horror films. Check out their website at http://www.capevideoonline.com.
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