"Evil Breed"...Richard Grieco, Jenna Jameson, and a hungry, horny monster

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/evilbreedsamhain.php

Man, this movie is awful. Awful, awful, awful. It's cheap, dull, boring, repetitive, illogical, and dull. (Did I mention that it's dull?) In the first five minutes you get a sex scene followed by two killings, and then it's a good forty-five minutes before anything else happens. Instead of getting what you would expect from a movie of this ilk, you get interminable scenes of people talking, people taking out the trash, people eating, people reading books about Druids, people building fires, porn star Jenna Jameson attempting to act, aging porn star Ginger Lynn Allen attempting to act, and Canada trying to pass itself off as Ireland (ha!). Given that this movie barely runs and hour and change, tossing in forty-five minutes of nothing wasn't exactly a wise move.

In addition to being a chore to sit through, Evil Breed is also derivative beyond belief. Entire scenes have been cannibalized from other movies and recreated in very clumsy fashion. The opening, in which former 21 Jump Street pretty boy Richard Grieco and porn star Chasey Lain (who appears to be heavily self-medicated) get it on in a tent before being slaughtered by the evil creature that roams the woods of Ireland, is lifted straight out of Dog Soldiers, with a bit of The Evil Dead thrown in for good measure. The scene in which many of the characters watch a horror flick while discussing the stupidity of horror movie characters and the survival rates of virgins in horror movies is a blatant rip-off of Scream (some of the dialogue is repeated verbatim). To make matters worse, the footage the characters are shown watching is a bastardization of a scene in one of the Halloween flicks. And the evil creature that roams the woods of Ireland (identified as The Shape in the credits, which is yet another insult to Halloween) looks like the result of a drunken three-way between the Toxic Avenger, Sloth from The Goonies, and Lou Gossett's character in Enemy Mine. If there is an original idea to found here, I must have missed it.

Under normal circumstances I would jump all over the director for foisting such garbage on an unsuspecting public. Problem is, this movie hasn't arrived under normal circumstances. See, according to Evil Breed director Christian Veil, he was hired to shoot a straight-up gore and sex flick. Well, numerous things went awry somewhere along the way, and Veil was never able to shoot exactly what he originally had in mind. Furthermore, the movie was taken away from him during post-production, then rewritten and reshot. And, to add insult to injury, much of the gore and sex was removed from the final product. I wouldn't testify in court as to the validity of Veil's claims, but I do believe him, and the deleted footage included here does lend credence to his some of his assertions. (Veil, whose assembly cut is readily available as a bootleg, has actually gone so far as to publicly apologize for this version of the movie.) I just cannot understand why the producers chose to cut out what are essentially the movie's only reasons for being. Did they really think that anyone interested in seeing a movie titled Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain wants forty-five minutes of people doing little more than making coffee or riding around in a Volkswagen van? (I forgot to mention these two examples, as well as the following one, in my earlier rant.) Better yet, do they think fans of gore and sex flicks are looking for meaningless shots of ducks in a pond? (I have no idea why these shots are included. I just know that there are more ducks in this movie than there are in Daffy's extended family.) Would a class action suit against the producers be out of the question? I'm up for it if anybody else is.

The movie does provide some entertainment, primarily in the form of several unintentional laughs. Listening to Ginger Lynn Allen attempt an Irish accent almost had me rolling on the floor. Halfway through her first line of dialogue she forgets the accent, only to pick it up a few minutes later. Later on the Irish accent suddenly morphs into an English one and then back. (Ginger also gets to engage in some kick boxing and kung fu with the monster before she's finally killed. That's good stuff.) In addition to looking patently absurd, the monster moves around like a Sleestak hopped up on methamphetamines. The monster lives in an underground lair, where he chains his victims to a stone slab before killing them and eating them. Thing is, the monster has a habit of leaving a knife on a table right next to the slab, which allows his victims to cut their bonds and flee. Even more ridiculous is the fact that the monster left a frying pan (huh?) in one of his lair's cells; the heroine gets trapped in the cell, finds the frying pan, and uses it to beat the monster to death. (I really liked it when the heroine was beating the monster to death and started thinking about all of the people the monster had killed, including a character she had never met!) Porn star Taylor Hayes has a scene in which her life slowly slips away, the product of her union with the monster lying dead a few feet away, the umbilical cord still attached. Taylor explains to the heroine why the monster has been kidnapping women, although I don't understand exactly how Taylor came about this information. I know the monster doesn't speak English, so I guess maybe Taylor speaks Monster. When it comes to being an actress, Jenna Jameson doesn't even make a convincing hiker, although she does get the movie's best death scene, during which the monster slices open her right breast, removes the silicone implant, and stares at it uncomprehendingly. You get Showgirls co-star Bobbie Phillips as a college professor (ha!) who keeps pronouncing the word "Celts" with a soft "C." (Bobbie and her students—all five of them—raised the money for their trip to Ireland by selling candy and T-shirts. Okay.) And then there's the ending, during which the heroine suddenly turns evil and attacks the woman who has rescued her, which contradicts what has come before. If the evil is transferable, why would the monster need human females in order to procreate? (Veil claims this ending was written by one of the production company's gophers and shot by a drunken director of photography. I believe him, as this ending is just plain stupid as hell, and there's equipment visible in many of the shots.)

[Montauk6]

1. Don't know what's scarier: Jenna's foray into mainstream or

the notion that Grieco's still getting work!

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

2. I've gotta go with Grieco on that one...

DEFINITELY the scariest part of this (or any) movie...

:toast:

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

3. The 'death by bowel' scene was cool,

I laughed at the silicone implant gag & was suitably repulsed by the dead baby still attatched to its mother, but boy that was very little reward for an excrutiating 60 minutes or so. And fuck me that ending made the twist in "Switchblade Romance" ("Haute Tension") seem genius. FWIW, Veil's apology for the film as it is (& after the BBFC chopped another 30 seconds in their "knife + breast = wank material for perverts" mentality):



With the imminent release of Samhain (the original title. I have nothing to do with the stupid new title this movie is afflicted with) in the UK, which will apparently be even more cut down that the already watered down version I finally managed to see as part of the ongoing legal *beep* that surrounds this film, I would like to apologize to fans everywhere (and even to people who don't like the film anyways) for what you will see has very little to do with me.

When I saw the final version of the film, I must admit that I was somewhat relieved that it wasn't as bad as I expected. Some of the editorial choices made it better. Some are just plain stupid and/or atrocious. The music and sound work are stellar however. The color timing is uneven: great at times, *beep* at others. But in the end, this is not the movie I intended to make despite the fact that my name remains splattered (literally) all over it.

I get the rap for writing this film but truly, many people had their fingers in it, from the distributors (including their receptionist, I kid you not!) on to Mariani, who should claim credit for all the Screamish references. He is the horror trivia buff that wanted those in, not me. In the end, I was mostly a typist who tried to fit in a semicoherent structure all the mumbo jumbo they wanted packed in as exposition in this flick, except for most of the gore scenes. Mariani did come up with the Grieco one.

I also get the rap in the credits along with Francois DeLorimier Millette for the editing of the film, but I did not edit this version. Granted, they took whole chunks of what I and Francois did and either tightened it up or changed the order, but this is not MY CUT of the film. Neither was the rough cut, as it was an assembly of the film, still far from its completion.

The ending in this release was not shot by me but by another director, Roger Cardinal, and with a (rumor has it) drunken DP - which would explain the abondant display of film equipment in some shots as well as why half the scene is out of focus. The script for the ending was written by Warehouse Productions gopher boy, and that alone shows you how much care was given to this film by its producer, William Mariani and its distributors, Oasis International. The intended version of this film, which was never shot thanks to union problems caused by ACTRA, can be read on my website, www.movieseals.biz, in the Samhain section of the Films Menu.

Ironically enough, Cardinal did not get paid either for his Samhain contribution, a trend that we experienced throughout the film. It took over a year to get the entire crew and suppliers on this film paid (with the notable exception of little old me) and I had to be witness for numerous lawsuits. Mariani tried to have my girlfriend deported (as revenge for testifying against him in court) and tried also unsuccessfully to put the RCMP on my ass for putting MY film on the web (for which I DID NOT get paid for the rights) for my efforts... As pointed out to the RCMP, the film had been online for quite a while before me (with so much as five different versions circulating!)... Maybe paying your crew and lab bills would help keeping the film out of the net, Mariani... Just a thought.
For all the claims about the budget on this film, it has been recently unearthed thanks to all the legalities than more than half of the film's budget made its way inside Mariani's pockets, leaving us with very little to fend off on the screen. He should be the one investigated by the RCMP...

Interestingly enough, most of the losers who ruined this film had enough sense to not claim credit for their job, except Mariani who pushes the audacity as claiming a post-production supervisor credit (which is ironic considering is tech skills are pretty much limited to surf porn on his laptop - but it does come in handy for him when it's time to cast!).

I was hired to do the goriest slasher flick I could do. This is not what will be on display on October 24. There was a lot more gore in my version, more humor, more nudity. I tried to make a film for fans of the genre, being a fan of the genre. They sanitized it as much as they could - and somehow removed the humor and much nudity, which I do not understand - and try to cheaply MTVize it, which is amongst the weakest parts of this edit. The film was simply not shot for this.

I fought long and hard for this film to be what I thought would be what fans would want to see but I failed in the end and for that, I sincerely apologize to gorehounds and horror film fans everywhere. No matter if you love or loathe the film, you deserved to at least see what I had in mind, failure or not. The film that is being released is an OK film I think but it is not mine, and it is certainly not what it is being advertised as being...

Once again, I am sorry. Do not hold this one against me.

Peace out.

Christian Viel
Director

http://www.movieseals.biz/BLOG/B1841170592/C1335423894/E20051005193821/