Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain (2003)
Hey, do you remember that movie Scream? Or maybe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? What if you put them both together and took out the pacing? You’d get Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain. And you would also be very sorry about this fact.
When I saw this in the opening scene of the movie, I knew I was in for something special. I only wish this was the worst thing about "Evil Breed."
Premise: 1/5
Imagine, if you will, woods. In these woods Richard Grieco and his porn star girlfriend Chasey Lain are screwing in a tent. Then they both get killed and the movie, such as it is, begins.
A movie which plays out like any of the Friday the 13th school of slasher, with a The Hills Have Eyes aesthetic. For some reason, about 4 or 5 “kids” (half of which are porn stars in their 30s or approaching same) somehow are on a school trip to Ireland for some reason or another. I suppose they might be in college, but there’s a line about bake sales and T-shirt sales as fundraisers that smacks of high school to me. Either way, what this “trip” is about is uncertain, as there’s only one scene of them doing anything that might be considered academic (with only one of the kids–you guessed it, scowling virgin girl–seeming to have any idea what the teacher’s even talking about). Mostly they sit around watching horror movies, cracking idiotic jokes, having outstandingly poorly written and acted conversations, and either boffing or trying to get boffed. Except for the scowling virgin ice queen, who usually just acts scared of everything unless she’s ripping off lines from Scream about how big-breasted bimbos are always the first to die in horror movies, and blah blah blah. I think there might’ve been some kung fu in the movie briefly at some point, but as I’m currently trying to dig out the part of my brain that remembers watching this with an ice pick, I can no longer be certain. Either way, pretty much everyone dies at the end. The problem is, it basically takes a whole movie full of boring and painful moronic shit before you get to the sweet release of the end credits.
I hate you, "Evil Breed," for reminding me what a good horror movie is.
Cast: 1/5
There’s actually a couple not-so-bad people “acting” in this movie, and it does have aforementioned porn stars and not-porn-stars-but-pretty-hot girls in it. Bobbie Phillips who plays the teacher actually seems kind of believable at times, and I think scowling virgin ice queen Shae (played by Brandi-Ann Milbradt) might’ve been decent if the writing was consistent about anything at all ever. The problem is, the people in this movie who suck, well, they SUPER suck. Epic suckitude, in fact. There’s this character named Steve in the movie (played by Phil Price), whose sole purpose is to be the dumb jock who tells terrible jokes and awkwardly hits on the hottie who just always rolls her eyes at him–every scene with him in it is painful, and he’s in A LOT of the movie, so you get some deep hurting there. There’s also a brother and sister (I think they’re brother and sister) team of native Irish, Pandora (played by Ginger Lynn Allen) and Gary (played by Simon Peacock), and I promise you, you will NEVER hear worse fake Irish accents. Since I guess the budget was too taken up with porn stars (and most likely actual porn that the crew was spanking it to when they should’ve been filming a movie that could’ve been even slightly watchable), the “Irish” training these two received must not have consisted of more than watching Lucky Charms commercials 5 or 6 times and calling it a day. Really, other than hot girls there’s nothing I can honestly recommend this movie for in the casting department. Sadly, even the hot girl quotient is diminished by the unfortunate-looking dudes and the tremendously bad writing this movie suffers from.
I strongly suspect that this is actually home videos from the guys who produced, wrote, and directed this steaming pile of "movie."
Technical: 2/5
There’s 2 things in this movie that don’t suffer from the suck virus: the gore and the movie score by Goblin (who I’m sure I’ve rambled on about in at least a couple Italian horror movie reviews by now). I don’t know if the Goblin music made it to the final film (it turns out I saw a work-print version), since I’m almost 100% sure that the film makers just stole music from movies Goblin HAS scored and put it in their crappy flick. And speaking of putting GOOD stuff in your shitty movie, I call foul on having scenes from Halloween playing while this dumb-ass flick bumbles along. I know John Carpenter’s classic, sir, and you are no John Carpenter’s classic.
At any rate, the gore shows a modicum of awesome that the rest of the movie practically cripples. The opening scene where Richard Grieco tries to help his girlfriend up after she apparently fell in a pit was really cool–he grabs her by the hands and lifts her up, but only comes away with her upper half as all of her internal organs fall out. Pretty inspired stuff, even despite the above screenshot’s little oversight (blond no-blond). There was another scene where a guy gets his intestines pulled out through his own ass and then gets strangled to death with them, which was actually pretty hilarious. And there was a final amusing gore scene involving Jenna Jameson’s character (who we’d previously met before for only about 2 minutes and 3 lines of dialogue) being gutted on a table, with the cannibal freakazoid who guts her pulling out a silicone implant and giving it a nibble before throwing it away in disgust. I WISH there were more scenes like this in the movie, instead of so much retread from any slasher from the ’80s you could name. Above all, I wish that the promisingly gory (and stupid, I won’t deny) opening scene and first two deaths had actually set the tone for the rest of the movie. What I got instead was the opening scene which was maybe 5-10 minutes of promise, then an hour and ten of awful dialogue and character scenes, and then the final 10 or 15 minutes where everyone gets snuffed out one right after the other. No sense of pacing, and it made the good stuff much harder to enjoy.
Intestinal strangling: one of the only good things to come from this movie. It seriously is a hilarious scene, though.
Popcorn Factor: 2/5
I want you to know, I only give this 2 out of 5 because of the gore scenes I mentioned above. I absolutely don’t recommend watching this, because so much of it sucks beyond sucking. If you find yourself trapped with it and Jigsaw makes you watch it or cut off your own face or something, the movie probably won’t kill you and you’ll win. Jigsaw notwithstanding, though, if you must see this movie you’ll want to keep one finger on the fast forward button to get through all the drudgery. I promise you won’t miss anything if you just skip to all the scenes with red in them. Would this be more fun inebriated with a couple friends ragging on it? Probably not. There’s basically NOTHING to work with for at least an hour of this hour and twenty long flick, and that’s just wrong.