"I miss what I never knew…"
This was, ironically, the very last thing I wrote for the last issue of From The Sublime earlier this year. I’m not sure watching all six Breen films back to back counts as a labour of love, but getting insight from the brilliant Rob Hill - go watch his YouTube channel and wonder why nobody’s commissioned a TV series from him - into Neil’s weirdness was definitely worth it.
It takes a certain, special type of filmmaker to inspire interest just at the mere announcement of a new film on the way.
Scorcese, Malick, Aster, Nolan... These are the sort of names for whom just a confirmation they’re stepping behind the camera again is enough to drive speculation and anticipation to fever pitch.
And at the other end of the scale, you have Neil Breen. There’s no less interest and intrigue when he announces he’s making a new film - sporadic though they are, with just six movies in 20 years. It’s just for entirely different reasons.
For no one person defines the modern-day cult of the Bad Movie more than Neil Breen.
Much of the intrigue of Neil Breen’s films comes from the man himself. Like with the similarly notorious Tommy Wiseau, his origins are somewhat shrouded in, if not mystery, then at least a decent level of perhaps deliberate obfuscation.
What’s known is that Breen is in his 60s, lives in Las Vegas, and was previously an architect in California. He also worked for a short time as a real estate broker – in one rare interview he claimed it was only a year. Then, at some point in the 00s, decided to make a self-funded feature film.
That first film, Double Down, wasn’t so much released as escaped into the wild in 2005, eventually finding its way to Netflix as part of their DVD rental library from where it started to slowly build up its online notoriety online.
Despite the reaction to it, he kept on making more, before finally making what could arguably be his breakthrough with 2012’s Fateful Findings. Since then he’s made three other movies, and a How To guide for those wanting to follow in his footsteps.
But beyond that, we don’t know a lot about him. Even his real age, for instance - when someone posted on Twitter wishing him a happy 65rd birthday last November he insisted he was ‘much younger’. We don’t know if he has a family, for example – although we can reasonably guess at him owning a Ferrari and a nice house, given how often both feature in his films.
He hasn’t done a lot of media work – largely avoiding press, and as he handles his own distribution, rarely has to engage with the wider industry. But in the few interviews he has done, he’s claims to have wanted to make films from childhood.
He told Influx magazine in 2014: “The reality is, especially me growing up back east, Hollywood was a million miles away and it was literally a dream. But, it was really something that I was passionate about. So I knew that I needed to get and wanted to get a real job doing something creative and fun and that I could make money at, while never giving up the dream.
“That’s when I went to college to become an architect. Graduated college as an architect, practiced as an architect, but still never gave up the dream of being a filmmaker. Never being a part of the Hollywood insider’s group, I knew that I needed to self-fund my movies. I was willing to make that sacrifice and that’s how I got to this point.”
Notably few of his actors have talked about their experience working with him, so we don’t get much of an impression what his sets are like, or how he operates as a director, although Breen has always insisted he advertises for actors professionally, and that cast and crew are paid properly.
One actor who did break silence was Tommie Vegas, who appeared in a minor role in his second film, I Am Here Now.
“I wasn’t too impressed with the work that was done and the way things were done, so I kind of just left it at that,” she told the Las Vegas Weekly in 2014.
Beyond that, Breen has been largely content to let his films do the talking for him. And boy, have they had much to say.
Rob Hill, author of the fantastic Bad Movie Bible and host of the accompanying YouTube channel, is perhaps the nearest thing we have to a Breen expert.
“There’s something incredibly open about him,” he told From The Sublime.
“He doesn't seem to realise how much of himself he gives away, and that access draws us in. His work is also truly unique, even within this sphere. Unlike many of the worst filmmakers of the past and present, he isn't much of a movie fan and doesn't seem to be attempting to speak the language of cinema.
“It probably also helps that he's able to self-fund his movies, and therefore keep feeding his audience. Nobody else at his level is still active, unless you include Tommy Wiseau.”
For starters, though, let’s define what we mean by a Bad movie. There’s a difference between a B-movie and a Bad movie., a line which has tended to get blurred.
B-movies were originally a specific thing: low budget productions, with shorter running times, often genre-heavy (such as westerns or horror) and made to be shown as the second part of a cinematic double feature. Effectively, they were the film equivalent of a b-side on a single. They weren’t necessarily the reason you bought the record or went to the cinema, but they were a nice additional bonus.
And importantly while B-movies were often cheap filler, they weren’t incompetently made. They tended to feature lower grade actors, have less money for effects or be more schlocky, melodramatic or over the top but they were at least watchable. There’s a world of difference between the films of Roger Corman and the work of Ed Wood when placed side by side.
But as time went on, and double features became less of a thing, the term began being applied to any low-budget schlock and exploitation film - regularly conflating the idea of a B-movie and a Bad movie in audiences’ minds.
One of the key drivers for that, Stateside at least, was the rise of the Midnight Movie - late night screenings by television channels throwing on cheap films as filler for the schedules that got round the rules for content watersheds and expensive residuals. Often, these were hosted by a character making asides during the ad breaks about what you’d just watched, or what was coming up - such as Morgus the Magnificent or the legendary Elvira.
Thus was given national prominence the idea that these exploitation films could - and usually should - be accompanied by a healthy dose of snark and irony. Cinemas soon began to follow the same idea. While B-movies had been run as late-night showings since the 1930s, New York’s Elgin Theatre cinema began showing Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult film El Topo in midnight screenings specifically aimed at counterculture audiences.
So the idea of a healthy dose of irony and join-in commentary to low quality schlock was already sewn into the minds of the public before a bunch of snarky mid-Western nerds began hunting down and poking fun at legitimately awful films for new audiences. No, not Red Letter Media. We’re talking, of course, about Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
MST3K when it came along, initially as filler for the local KTMA channel in Minneapolis and then later to wider audiences on the Sci-Fi Channel and, ironically, in cinemas themselves, didn’t so much shine a spotlight on ironically enjoying Bad Movies as engulf it in neon lights and set it on fire.
The aftermath of MST3K continues to be felt today, 35 years after its debut. The show continues, originally via Netflix and now through crowdfunding. It split into rival shows such as Rifftrax. It birthed an entire genre of podcasts, audience screenings and YouTube channels where hunting down, watching and reviewing bad films became as much an industry as the B-movie itself.
And it brought to prominence a whole host of films which became cult features - classics never seems the right word here - because of their awfulness, their tediousness or general downright stupidity. Suddenly, in place of just B-movies, we had Bad Movies. Lots of them. And enjoying them became increasingly as popular as watching actually good films.
“Ultimately, I think a 'good bad' movie is a bad movie that isn't boring,” says Hill.
“Exactly how that's achieved by movies that don't engage us in the intended way is near impossible to pin down. But at the mainstream end of the spectrum, excess is important, and at the other end (the Neil end) perhaps it's kind of like Schadenfreude; we feel smarter than the filmmaker, we're amused by our own incomprehension of what we're seeing and how anyone could be so delusional.
“And it has to be sincere. There's nothing good about a deliberately bad movie.”
Which is where the lines have blurred even further.
The problem the Bad Movie obsession has generated is that it’s given rise to a need to create more bad movies. And a good example is New York Ninja.
Like many of the Bad Movies which find notoriety - such as John De Hart’s Get Even or the entire oeuvre that is Leo Fong films - New York Ninja (above) has its origins as a vanity project.
Taiwanese-born action star John Liu tried and failed to make his own film in 1984, aiming to cash in on the flourishing US ninja movie craze. It was shot guerrilla style, with very little budget - reportedly the visual effects kitty ran to a whole $100 - and with Liu writing, directing and starring.
Part-way through making it, however, support for the already shaky production collapsed completely with the distribution company going bust. It was never completed, and Liu largely retired from the film industry, moving back to Taiwan to found the Zen Kwan Do martial arts discipline.
Then along came Vinegar Syndrome, a home media company with a speciality in rereleasing obscure trash and schlock films in prestige presentations, oftentimes giving awful flicks which would otherwise be completely forgotten about the level of treatment afforded prestige productions by the Criterion Collection.
They picked up the unfinished, audio-free reels from Liu’s production and - in an impressive piece of cinematic archaeology - pieced together something as close as possible to an proper film… if not necessarily Liu’s actual film.
As no dialogue had been recorded, Vinegar Syndrome hired a host of 80s VHS action stars, including Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson and Cynthia Rothrock, to revoice the original actors based on some liberally interpreted lip-reading and a script designed to try and plug the gaps. A suitably retro score was added by Voyag3r to complete the mood.
It’s a fascinating exercise to watch, but the question arises - is it just a bad movie, or is it a bad movie being released for the purposes of pisstaking?
A liberal response would be that it is both. What we’ve got, obviously, isn’t Liu’s original concept - and understandably he wanted nothing to do with Vinegar Syndrome’s release - so we’re only getting a third hand interpretation of the material, 25 years removed.
As they’re using the original reels, piecing together what was known about the film from the original cast and lipreading the dialogue, it is at least something of an analogue of Liu’s original idea.
But that’s as far as it goes, and given the liberties taken with the material to make it even vaguely make sense, the fact the voices are provided by B-movie actors, and the pastiche soundtrack, it’s impossible to divorce from the idea it’s there to be viewed in an entirely ironic way.
New York Ninja is a fun film to watch, for a variety of reasons, but it’s also a film that wasn’t meant to be seen - at least not in the format we got. It’s an enjoyable viewing experience, but it’s also arguably a bad faith one.
It’s not even just about celebrating mediocrity these days. The Bad Movie industry has become a very lucrative industry. Alongside the likes of Vinegar Syndrome are distribution companies specialising in the sort of weird, trashy, unlikeable or just plain bad movies that normally would have been buried in a landfill site and never spoken of again.
Severin has given new, 4K life to the likes of Cathy’s Curse while propping up cheap pish like the Birdemic series. SyFy – and Legend here in the UK – has given over much of its schedules to unwatchable toss from The Asylum and its ilk. Alamo Drafthouse built a cinema chain and distribution company on the VHS weirdness of Miami Connection, putting their work front and centre of schedules and giving the - albeit with tongue poking out of cheek - same legitimacy as Oppenheimer or Unforgiven.
Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is - or was, until Breen came along - held up as perhaps the worst vanity film ever made, but it generated a big budget, big name ‘fictionalised’ making-of starring the Franco brothers and their pals, a book by its co-star and put Wiseau firmly on the convention, midnight screening and Kickstarter circuits to cash in on his new found notoriety.
Similarly the discovery and release of Samurai Cop – one of Amir Shervan’s multitude of crap attempts to make Hollywood-style action movies with none of the flair, talent, budget, cast, location, props or even wigs – ended up with an seemingly intentionally awful sequel being made, reuniting the original stars 25 years on with the likes of Wiseau and Joe Estevez for a film where irony threatens to collapse the whole thing in on itself.
Despite this, though, Hill still believes growth of the Bad Movie culture has been a good thing.
“Aside from its potential to bring people together, it throws the spotlight on forgotten movies and can make fans appreciate the really good ones even more,” he says.
In terms of the nature of those fans' reactions, I think things are getting more positive all the time. There was a point when everyone on YouTube seemed to be bitter and angry that they'd somehow been let down by these things, but it's not really like that now.
“When I watch a documentary like Best Worst Movie (about Troll 2) and see fans asking the director why he's so useless, it makes me cringe horribly. But things have changed as this phenomenon has grown, and the filmmakers themselves have come to terms with their pasts.
“I've interviewed numerous people primarily known for their failures, and Neil's about the only one who doesn't appreciate the way in which fans react ironically to his movies.
“I'm not a fan of sneering, we should all be aware these people actually made movies rather than sitting talking about them, but that said it can be fun to come across something so technically, creatively and morally reprehensible that it deserves to be torn apart.
“Doesn't happen often, though.”
All of which brings us back to Breen.
His latest film, Cade: The Tortured Crossing, has finally been released. Like all Breen’s films, not only is it self-financed and self-produced, it’s also self-distributed, appearing in 2024 in customers mailboxes on a DVD-R in a jewel case with a printed sticky label.
Importantly, it’s the first sequel to one of his previous works that Breen’s attempted, continuing the storytelling of 2018’s Twisted Pair and the stories of Cane and Cade, two alien human robot things sent to earth to save us. One’s good, with humanity’s best interests at heart. The other is evil - something we know because he’s got a beard.
I sat down to watch The Tortured Crossing at the end of a day going through his entire back catalogue. I’d seen the other films, individually, before, but thought watching them en masse might give an insight into what makes his movies so much more special than the rest of the bad movie cult.
It is, like all of Breen’s previous work, laughably bad. But this time it goes beyond that, into genuinely baffling levels of ineptitude. For someone who oversees pretty much every aspect of the production himself, and who has now made six films - and who claims to have read numerous books on filmmaking - there’s a fascinating, consistently downward trajectory in terms of quality as his films go along.
His earlier work was shot largely on location, on film, around Las Vegas. For all Double Down is a preposterous James Bond wankfest it does, surprisingly, look passable, making use of real places in the city and the desert to at least give a sense of solidity to the movie, albeit one not supported by the script or performances. But as time has gone by, Breen’s increasingly resorted to using greenscreen for his work.
Whether this is because it’s cheaper, easier to control, or just another cinematic delusion based on how ‘big’ studios make their films isn’t clear, but it’s meant they look cheaper and crapper with each subsequent release.
Even Twisted Pair managed to pull off some location shooting - albeit pretty much exclusively in Breen’s house or his local college. But with The Tortured Crossing, the entire thing is either using stock footage or shot on green screen - and exceptionally badly keyed in greenscreen at that. Even things like staircases are a stock photo onto which actors have been poorly composited in.
All of Breen’s films have had a weirdly messianic flavour, casting him as a super spy or a super soldier or a deity who walks among us, transcending humanity and here to save us from the corrupt institutions.
Here he takes that one step further, building - well, continuing - his role as Cade Alteir from Twisted Pair, a twin who has been enhanced by aliens with well, it’s never actually clear. Somewhere between the Six Million Dollar Man and an X-Man seems to be the intent, but like all Breen’s hero figures the actual details are lost in a word salad of vaguely futuristic terms with no actual meaning.
With The Tortured Crossing, not only is Cade somewhere between Jesus and Batman, but it ends with him training a new group of genetically experimented-on people to serve as more defenders of the Earth from evil corporations, banks, governments, criminals, and villains with sellotaped-on fake moustaches.
Surprisingly, for once, he doesn’t rely on voiceover to explain what’s going on - something which, if written down, would look like the sort of manifesto you’d see being flagged by the security services as a potential threat. The downside of that is we’re reliant on him - and his cast - acting.
And ultimately, that’s the problem.
Because whatever else Breen thinks he’s making with these films, ultimately you’re watching a pension-age man with no discernible performance skills spending his own money filming himself and a bunch of other people with no discernible performance skills in front of stock photos of fields and staircases, where they deliver badly written exposition, occasionally shout ‘no’ in lieu of emoting, and react to stock footage and clip art explosions they can’t see.
Oh, and he fights a CGI tiger. Because of course he does.
Six films into his cinematic career - not to mention his guide on how to make films – the question starts to arise: Is Breen in on the joke? Surely, after nearly 20 years of being the punchline, he must realise the vast majority of his audiences aren’t watching his films because they see him as talented?
Rob Hill is not so sure. “I’m asked this a lot and I honestly don't know, but, despite everything, I'm inclined to believe he's sincere, although that's a view that gets harder to justify with each new work.
“If he is in it for the money he's doing everything wrong, because buying his movies is notoriously difficult and he does nothing to engage with the bad movie crowd.
“Tommy Wiseau's made millions touring The Room. I've intro'd Neil's last two movies at premieres and the hoops promoters are required to jump through – designed to make sure the film's presented sincerely – are ridiculous. He's making a fraction of what he would if he was willing to exploit the true appeal of his work.
“I also find it easy to believe there are people out there who are this delusional. His early movies were unquestionably sincere, as are oddities like After Last Season and The Empiricist, both of which are weirder and worse than anything Neil's made.
“So, if people really can be that mad, why not Neil?”
BREENOGRAPHY
All films written, directed, produced and edited by Neil Breen. And also financed, catered, marketed, distributed and everything else really...
Double Down (2005)
A rogue CIA agent (Breen) stops a terrorist attack on Las Vegas whilst being plagued by visions of his dead wife and a belief he can heal people.
I Am Here... Now (2009)
Disappointed in mankind's behaviour, the creator (Breen) arrives on Earth in the form of an human with a circuit board glued to their chest, and meets various troubled souls on his journey to Vegas.
Fateful Findings (2012)
A writer and computer expert (Breen) is hit by a car, hacks into government databases to expose corruption, reunited with his childhood best friend, and faces the consequences of their youthful dabbling in the mystical arts. We’ve all been there.
Pass Thru (2016)
A double denim-clad messianic being from the future (Breen) travels to modern-day America to wipe out 300,000,000 "bad people" and bring about a new era of peace on Earth.
Twisted Pair (2018)
Identical twin brothers Cale and Cade (Breen) are abducted by aliens and grow up to become become superhuman hybrid Al humanoids - one working to save mankind, while the other has more evil intentions and a beard.
Cade: The Tortured Crossing (2023)
Cade restores a mysterious, run down mental asylum and discovers the patients are being experimented on - so trains them as warriors to protect humanity. Cale wears some jam on his face and eventually finds redemption.
BONUS! Five Film Retrospective (2020)
Neil humbly shares his professional movie knowledge and reveals how he was able to make the above films. Not that we're any the wiser.