You know, if ever there were a “Death To America Showcase!” on Al-Jazeera, eventually, “Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain” would show up on it.
In fact, it would probably be their launch title.
Why the deliberately political reference in a space you’ve come to know (and I hope to God love by now) as a space devoted to movie coverage? Well, it’s fairly simple.
“Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain” is one of the biggest examples I’ve seen of cinematic foreigners who hate America I’ve seen since…well…since probably “Black Hawk Down”. And for a non-action film that’s really saying something.
See, “Evil Breed” is about a whole bunch of Americans who go on a trip to Ireland, act the part of typical a*****e Americans when abroad, and then get systematically slaughtered by a tribe of inbred cannibals living in the Irish bogs.
Now, the first sign that “Evil Breed” is going to be a total raving flop is not in the first five minutes. Oh no…that comes when you look at the cast list.
At least two former porn stars can be found in “Evil Breed”. As if that weren’t bad enough, they dredged up the career of Richard Greico. You remember him, right? The guy who was washed up back when Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan were bouncing their heads around the Roxbury back in the late nineties?
Yeah, THAT Richard Greico!
So whoooo boy. What we’ve got here is the perfect storm for a bad movie–a lousy plotline containing more cliches per minute than most romantic comedies and a cast whose biggest assets have nothing to do with their time spent studying Stanislavski.
When it takes less than fifty seconds for the movie to segue into wholesale nudity from the female cast, you know that you’re not going to be looking at a serious Oscar contender here.
The effects are frankly about as bad. Twenty nine minutes fifty two seconds in proves to be high-water mark for lousy effects–the fact that that’s a dummy is pretty obvious. And check out the unidentified organ removed from a victim at the one hour one minute mark. That look like a plastic bag full of red gelatin to anyone else?
However, to give credit where credit is due, “Evil Breed” does manage to stumble on an innovative way to prevent a “spot-the-wires” moment at the one hour, two minute twelve second mark by only filming the decapitation from the neck up.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some kind of massive joke being perpetrated here. For instance, there’s an opening scene when they describe exactly what a B-movie character would do in a certain situation surprisingly similar to what they’re faced with. They then do exactly what they describe, with the exact same results that they describe.
If they’re going for some kind of weird parody / irony sort of concept, then man did they succeed. But even this is a limited sort of success–to successfully mock the conventions, they have to actually USE the conventions, and this gives them a limited amount of innovation available to them.
The ending is pretty ludicrous, frankly. It’s mostly a lot of killing and nudity, with some gore and assorted disgusting thrown in for flavor. It looks to be where most of the special effects budget was used. Even worse, it uses all the standard conventions that I just railed about–including “the boring virgin is the last to live”, and a strange twist that just didn’t make much in the way of sense at all.
The special features will be fantastically limited and only involve two deleted scenes, along with trailers for “Green River Killer”, “Tamara” and “Saw 2”.
All in all, “Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain” is either a spectacular practical joke on its audience, or just a really bad joke on its audience, depending on whether or not this was all actually meant as a joke.
Either way, frankly, I’m not laughing.
