Breeders

Trash purveyor Tim Kincaid cooks up his own bizarre paraphrase of slasher flicks in which serial-killer murders are replaced with insemination by an alien monster. The absence of any filmmaking talent, from a feel for pacing to guiding of the actors, doesn’t prevent Kincaid from apparently taking his deliriously muddled miscarriage seriously. Thanks to that, he subjects viewers to moralising pronouncements from the mouths of the wooden actors and lets them bitterly experience everything, including those monologues. However, he also knows very well that his overwrought exploitation of the dangers of the night-time streets of New York in the 1980s needs proper attractions for the viewer. Therefore, the film abounds with shots of nudity, which comes across like an absurd promenade in see-through swimsuits thanks to the preference for sunbathing in bikinis. All of this is topped off with the closing sequence, in which the blank expressions of the actors prove that the counter-shots were filmed separately and the actors had no idea how or to what they were supposed to react. One would like to say that Breeders radiates Ed Woodian naïveté, but that’s not the case, as it only enviously gazes at that from a thicket of artless imbecility, which, together with the incoherent premise, may diminish the extent to which it is unintentionally funny. (11/17/2022)