Film Brain delves into the warped world of Neil Breen for the first time in his follow-up to Twisted Pair, where Cade and Cale return - and this time, it's entirely on a greenscreen...
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00:00 This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector.
00:04 And I'm in Bristol today and I'm in front of the watershed
00:07 because I am actually going to see the new Neil Breen movie,
00:10 Cade, The Tortured Crossing.
00:12 I cannot believe I'm watching a Neil Breen movie.
00:15 I cannot believe I'm watching a new Neil Breen movie.
00:19 (piano music)
00:21 (car engine roaring)
00:27 (piano music)
00:30 Cade, played by Neil Breen,
00:37 has been using his AI enhanced superpowers
00:39 to fight for good and aid humanity
00:41 and has invested in a hospital to that end.
00:43 However, unbeknownst to Cade,
00:45 the hospital is in an extremely poor state
00:47 and a front for human trafficking
00:49 where Cade's evil twin, Kale, also played by Breen,
00:53 whose powers and body are deteriorating,
00:55 is experimenting on the patients to try and cure himself.
00:58 Once Cade learns of the situation,
01:00 he starts training the patients to fight back.
01:03 And back in the studio.
01:06 So Las Vegas architect turned filmmaker Neil Breen
01:08 has managed to amass himself quite a following
01:10 among bad movie fans, not least of which
01:13 because his movies from Fateful Findings to I Am Here, Now,
01:17 have all the markings of a dirty auteur.
01:20 And I don't just mean because the unnecessary sex scenes
01:22 that he keeps inserting into his films,
01:24 which are genuinely quite uncomfortable.
01:26 Breen's movies are very distinctive.
01:29 They have a style all of their own.
01:31 You can tell you're watching one of his movies
01:34 from the flagrant disregard for things like pacing or acting
01:38 to the fact they keep circling back around
01:40 to the same themes and concerns
01:42 of vast government conspiracies, technology or AI,
01:46 or casting himself as a messiah figure
01:48 in the center of the narrative.
01:51 Breen's movies have become the face
01:53 of modern bad movie fandom.
01:56 And yet despite this, I've never actually before now
02:00 watched one of Breen's movies, not from start to finish.
02:03 I've seen plenty of my fellow reviewers
02:06 tackle them over the years.
02:08 So I think I've got a fairly good grasp of Breen,
02:11 but truly you never really understand something
02:14 until you taste it for yourself.
02:17 And thus I decided to travel all the way
02:19 to Bristol's watershed to see "Cade, The Tortured Crossing"
02:23 on the big screen exactly how it deserves to be seen.
02:27 And of course, it's the best choice
02:29 for picking out as my first Breen movie
02:31 because it is in fact a sequel
02:33 to his 2018 movie "Twisted Pair"
02:36 where he starred as twins, Cade and Kale,
02:39 who were granted AI-based powers,
02:41 but also were good and evil.
02:43 And that's basically all you need to know
02:45 from "Twisted Pair" going in to "Tortured Crossing"
02:49 because largely Breen does actually recap the earlier movie
02:53 and shows large clips from it.
02:55 It doesn't really have all that much relation
02:58 to the earlier film aside
03:00 from having those two characters in it.
03:02 It largely exists as a standalone work.
03:05 Once again, the movie's introduced by Ty Singh
03:07 at the Bristol Bad Film Club,
03:08 as well as ardent Neil Breen enthusiast Rob Hill
03:11 at the Bad Movie Bible,
03:13 a channel that I heartily insist you subscribe to
03:15 if you haven't already.
03:16 He does great work over there.
03:18 But certainly I can't think of a better place
03:21 to see my first Breen movie
03:22 than in a crowd of highly rowdy
03:24 and let's be honest, increasingly drunk Bad Movie fans,
03:28 especially given the relatively close proximity
03:30 of the Watershed's bar.
03:31 There were several audience members
03:33 that kind of popped out to top themselves up
03:35 in the film's quieter moments.
03:37 By the end of the film, catcalls like, "I love you, Breen!"
03:41 were very much a common occurrence over my shoulder.
03:45 And I can definitely say that for better or for worse,
03:48 Breen has created an unforgettable movie experience.
03:52 The first thing that immediately hits you
03:53 about "The Torture Crossing"
03:54 is that it's entirely shot on a green screen
03:57 from start to finish.
03:58 It looks like a Sega CD game from the '90s.
04:01 I suspect this is probably down to COVID
04:03 in that it allowed him to minimize and space out his actors,
04:07 but also meant that he couldn't travel out to locations.
04:10 But let's be honest,
04:11 Breen was already experimenting with this
04:14 in its predecessor, "Twisted Pair,"
04:16 where that had great soirs
04:17 where Breen was comping himself
04:19 into stop footage and photos,
04:22 or just plain straight up just using the clips
04:25 in the body of the narrative.
04:27 "The Torture Crossing" takes this further
04:29 and basically stretches that out to the entire movie.
04:33 And Breen has absolutely no regard
04:36 for whether the clips even remotely match with each other,
04:39 which makes for an extremely disconcerting effect.
04:42 There is a early scene where Breen as Cade
04:46 is talking about the fact that he's invested
04:49 in this hospital,
04:51 and not only has he weirdly decided
04:53 that the locale for this
04:55 should be in the middle of a staircase,
04:57 but then it will cut to people applauding
05:00 clearly in a massive arena,
05:02 which makes for an absolutely bewildering juxtaposition.
05:06 That means "The Torture Crossing"
05:07 has a noticeably different feel to Breen's other movies,
05:10 which still had on-location work in them,
05:12 that was still extremely weird
05:14 because of things that Breen was asking him to do in public,
05:17 but now divorced from as much reality as he possibly can,
05:21 Breen's work feels more alien than ever.
05:25 And that's saying something
05:26 because he's always had this kind of
05:28 hallucinogenic, dreamlike quality.
05:31 He's managed to cultivate, largely on accident, it appears,
05:35 the same thing that David Lynch
05:37 has managed to do by purpose,
05:38 this kind of almost dissociative archness
05:42 to the entire proceedings,
05:44 especially because of the frighteningly wooden performances
05:47 from the actors in his movies,
05:49 which almost seem like they've been raided
05:51 for the local Amdram society.
05:54 Breen doesn't seem to direct actors
05:56 and just move them around like clip art in the frame.
06:00 And that's especially true in this movie
06:02 where they're all shot on green screens
06:04 and he can just move them around like character sprites
06:07 in the Simpsons cartoon studio.
06:09 Man, my references are really getting esoteric today.
06:12 This is gonna be fun to edit.
06:14 As par for the course with Breen's movies,
06:16 all the actors give flat, monotone line deliveries
06:19 of things that seem like they were given to them
06:21 just moments before the camera's rolling
06:23 and given exactly one take to nail it.
06:26 Said it all in right order, let's just move on.
06:28 Oh, you stumbled over your words in the middle of it?
06:30 It's fine, we'll include it in the movie anyway.
06:33 And in "The Tortured Crossing,"
06:34 they might be the most bewildered they've ever been,
06:37 especially because they literally have no context clues
06:40 for their surroundings or what they're about
06:42 to be comped into.
06:43 There has been some debate, especially in recent years,
06:46 whether Breen has become self-aware
06:48 and is just knowingly playing towards his audience,
06:51 the same kind of thing that afflicted Toye
06:52 was so many years ago and has made much of his post-run work
06:56 completely unwatchable, ironic or otherwise.
07:00 And I think the jury's still gonna be out with Breen
07:02 after "The Tortured Crossing" is more widely seen
07:06 because especially in the first 20 minutes,
07:08 I was definitely thinking that to myself,
07:10 especially because you can't knowingly assemble
07:14 these things and not think that people are gonna laugh
07:17 at you for it.
07:18 The introduction to Cade in this movie
07:22 is that he's walking down a street
07:24 in somewhere in Eastern Europe,
07:26 and he walks into the path of an oncoming tram,
07:30 which crashes into him.
07:32 And by crashes, I mean it pauses and Breen goes,
07:36 "Ugh!" for a couple of frames before falling to the ground.
07:40 And of course, because this is a stock photo,
07:42 no one rushes to his aid or anything.
07:45 No one comes out of the tram.
07:47 It's just a completely still-framed bit of video
07:51 as Breen just awkwardly gets to his feet and goes,
07:53 "I'm fine, I'm fine."
07:55 I guess this is his way of reestablishing the fact
07:58 that his character has powers and super healing,
08:01 but it's a really odd way of doing it.
08:04 It's a very comical one, to say the least.
08:08 And then we get this opening action sequence
08:11 where he's chasing down these balaclava-clad
08:15 human traffickers that kind of look more like ninjas.
08:18 And he's got this kind of $6 million man fighting style
08:22 in that he can replicate himself multiple times.
08:25 And it's so goofy and so uncomfortably done
08:28 that I was in absolute hysterics
08:30 in the opening stage of this movie.
08:32 And it almost resembles a kind of anti-comedy sketch
08:35 in the way that it's kind of dragged out.
08:38 Later on, there's a sequence
08:40 where he's walking through a field,
08:42 and then suddenly, with no explanation whatsoever,
08:46 he gets into a fight sequence with a white tiger.
08:50 This is a moment that is sure to be instantly memed
08:53 the moment the movie hits digital platforms,
08:56 because it is a jaw-dropping moment,
08:59 even by Breen standards, where he cuts to himself
09:04 looking at this photo of a white tiger,
09:07 or maybe just a picture of a tiger
09:08 that he's just turned white.
09:10 And then it turns into a CGI creation
09:14 that he has a fight with for no reason whatsoever.
09:17 This has nothing to do with what is happening on screen.
09:21 Breen is fighting this CGI tiger that looks so crude.
09:26 It almost looks like the cow scene
09:29 from "Kung Pao Enter the Fist."
09:32 And then it just turns into the kind of Muse character
09:36 from "Twisted Pair" played by a different actor,
09:39 but still, I think, meant to be that same character.
09:42 And if you're asking the question,
09:43 "What the hell does that have to do with anything?"
09:45 the answer is nothing, nothing whatsoever.
09:48 Maybe the Muse was testing out his fighting skills
09:51 like Kato in "The Pink Panther,"
09:53 just attacking him unsuspectingly.
09:55 I don't know.
09:57 It just happens.
09:58 And then the movie continues, and it gets even more crazy.
10:02 And I also have to mention the rolling hills
10:05 where that scene takes place,
10:08 a stock photo that Breen uses constantly,
10:11 but especially in the film's final scenes,
10:14 which looks like the same kind of hills
10:16 that Julie Andrews was on in "The Sound of Music."
10:19 So I had to resist the urge to suddenly burst out,
10:21 "The hills are alive with the sound of Breen!"
10:26 But those allegations of self-awareness
10:29 are largely disproven by the rest of the movie,
10:31 which is just as incompetently put together as it always is.
10:34 And also, judging by his screen presence,
10:36 Breen doesn't seem to possess a knowing quality in his body.
10:40 He's six movies into his career,
10:42 and he still doesn't know how to behave
10:44 in front or behind the camera.
10:46 In front of it, Breen is an incredibly stilted performer
10:51 that makes him a compelling screen presence
10:53 in the reverse way, in that he does the exact opposite
10:57 of what you really should be doing,
10:58 and it becomes kind of perverse to see someone
11:01 who so clearly should not be acting in front of the camera,
11:04 making himself the central figure of the entire movie,
11:08 like he always does.
11:10 Breen always puts his ego front and center in these movies,
11:15 and given that he has an entirely digital world
11:18 to reign over, you get a big dose of that
11:21 in "The Tortured Crossing," in that we get an early sequence
11:24 where he rides around in his prized Ferrari
11:28 that we've glimpsed several times in his movies,
11:30 and now appears to have had a green screen
11:32 propped up behind it so that he can drive it on camera.
11:36 But also, his character, I kid you not,
11:40 actually lives in a castle, like he's Dracula.
11:44 This leads to a fabulously weird sequence
11:47 where Breen leads the patients back to his castle,
11:50 and this results in all of them going,
11:52 "Wow, a castle!
11:54 "Oh my goodness, a castle!"
11:56 He does a reaction shot for every single one
12:00 of the characters, and he does this
12:02 because Breen is apparently loathe
12:04 to throw any footage out whatsoever.
12:07 All of it must go into the movie in some way,
12:10 even if it's completely repetitious like it is here.
12:14 But he leads them inside and greets them
12:16 and says that the castle is absolutely filled
12:18 with tens of rooms for them to sleep in,
12:21 which feels like an absolutely bizarre place
12:23 for him to live, considering he only appears
12:25 to be living there by himself.
12:27 And rather understandably, the doctors decide
12:29 they don't trust him, so their solution
12:31 is that instead, the patients are going to sleep
12:34 on the ground floor by the staircase, on the stone flooring.
12:39 And that's exactly what they do,
12:41 'cause that's not weird in the slightest.
12:44 Breen doesn't seem to understand concepts
12:46 like context or logic.
12:48 He mostly just seems in love with the sound
12:51 of his own voice and gives himself ample room
12:53 to speechify from the aforementioned staircase scene
12:57 to a scene set in a courtroom where he appears
13:00 to take the judge's podium to give a speech
13:03 to the crowd, the same crowd from the stairwell scene
13:06 earlier, that makes you wonder,
13:08 okay, is this character now a judge?
13:10 Is he handing down the legal ramifications
13:13 of what he's talking about here?
13:15 I don't know, and the movie never makes it clear.
13:18 In fact, he so loves the sound of his own voice
13:21 that there are several moments where his character
13:24 walks into scenes that are clearly established
13:27 as having no one around to talk to,
13:30 and Breen will suddenly cut to a hard,
13:32 dramatic closeup of his face, just saying
13:34 some awe-inspiring, altruistic thing,
13:38 which might be impressive or dramatic
13:41 if, A, he was saying them to anyone,
13:43 and B, they made any sense in the situations
13:47 that he was saying them in.
13:48 Who are you talking to, Breen?
13:50 You're talking to absolutely no one!
13:53 What makes this worse is that I genuinely believe
13:55 that Breen thought he was saying something.
13:57 The movie is just about coherent enough
13:59 that it kind of comes across as Breen's critique
14:02 on the healthcare system and mental health in particular,
14:06 and that's a valiant thing to talk about,
14:08 but also it appears to be a critique of that system
14:11 from someone that has no idea how it works or operates.
14:15 Take the hospital at the center of the movie.
14:18 It's not just run down.
14:20 It appears to be actively dilapidated
14:23 and falling down around the patients.
14:26 The backdrops used throughout the entirety of those scenes
14:30 are all pictures taken in an extremely run-down environment
14:35 that appears to have been abandoned
14:36 for maybe more than a decade,
14:38 and so you have literally paint coming off the walls.
14:43 You've got loads and loads of clutter and mess.
14:45 There's no order to anything whatsoever,
14:48 but also this mental hospital,
14:51 as clearly established in a stock shot
14:54 that Breen uses several times over the course of the movie,
14:59 also appears to be doing full-on medical procedures
15:02 like blood tests and experiments,
15:05 which are not typically the sort of things found
15:07 in a psychiatric institution
15:09 like the one that is meant to be depicted in the movie.
15:13 Breen just conflates the two together
15:16 because I guess they're hospitals,
15:18 so I guess they're pretty much the same thing.
15:20 No, they don't function necessarily the same way.
15:24 They're two different things.
15:26 The fact the hospital was so appalling
15:27 rats wouldn't even stay in it
15:29 makes the fact that Cade openly states
15:31 the invest in the hospital's sight unseen
15:34 absolutely hilarious.
15:36 Maybe you should've done a little bit more research
15:37 for pouring your money into this.
15:39 Really, that's all down on you.
15:42 Also, Cade didn't invest in this by himself.
15:45 He also collaborated with his friends in big business,
15:48 which you'll be completely unsurprised
15:50 for a Neil Breen movie,
15:51 turns out to be completely corrupt and untrustworthy
15:54 and fully intent on exploiting the patients
15:56 to get the most money out of them.
15:59 Luckily, that's something that a random,
16:01 poorly-composited explosion can fix.
16:03 (explosion booms)
16:04 But the true scale of just how bad Breen is as a director
16:07 is on full display in the interminable middle act
16:10 of the movie.
16:11 It is torturous for both the patients and the audience.
16:15 It feels like it will never end.
16:17 Breen, even this late into his career,
16:19 still doesn't understand basic cinematic language
16:22 or editing in that when you're cutting together scenes,
16:26 you don't need an establishing shot of a location
16:30 before the characters step into it.
16:32 But there are several moments where Breen
16:33 cuts to completely empty locations,
16:36 just showing us empty backdrops
16:39 before the characters walk into them, maybe minutes later.
16:42 That's not how movies work.
16:45 There will be moments where scenes just drag on
16:48 and on and on as we wait for characters
16:51 to slowly walk and exit out of the frame.
16:55 It's not a play.
16:56 You can cut all that stuff out,
16:58 and it would be far more economical
17:00 than having to sit through the drudgery
17:04 of the middle portion of this movie,
17:05 amplified by the fact that Breen loops over
17:09 an ambient horror movie soundtrack
17:12 through all these scenes in the hostel.
17:14 So you have this wailing, "Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!"
17:18 over about half an hour of the movie in the middle.
17:21 It grows extremely tedious.
17:24 There are several moments where I think the actors
17:27 are just improvising based on a prompt,
17:30 specifically the idea that they're on a mattress,
17:33 they're going through drug withdrawal symptoms,
17:36 and they're just writhing around on the bed.
17:39 And there are not one, but two scenes, at least,
17:43 that are virtually identical in content
17:45 that are just like this.
17:47 And the actors say pretty much the same things
17:50 in both of these sequences.
17:52 And it seems like Breen just went,
17:54 "I'm just putting both of these in the movie."
17:56 There's also a whole stretch of the movie
17:58 that are just completely superfluous and unnecessary.
18:02 There's an entire subplot about a group of police detectives
18:05 trying to track down the human trafficking ring
18:07 related to the hospital.
18:09 That goes completely nowhere!
18:11 Absolutely nothing comes of that subplot.
18:15 It just takes up time of which we do not need.
18:19 Breen himself actually disappears for large swaths
18:22 of the middle section of this movie.
18:25 And when Breen does appear,
18:26 it usually is the evil twin, Kale,
18:28 who is the real mastermind behind all this.
18:31 And the fact that he's playing a dual role
18:33 in both this and "Twisted Pair"
18:35 allows Breen to show off the full,
18:36 dramatic range of his ego,
18:38 and he allows himself to play the perfect, virtuous hero,
18:42 but also the increasingly pitiful villain,
18:45 who over the course of the film
18:46 gets ever weaker and more scarred.
18:49 And by the end of it, it's a blubbering mess,
18:51 crying, "Please kill me!
18:54 "Please kill me!"
18:56 And I do wonder if Breen convinced himself
18:59 that we were all going to go,
19:00 "Oh, he's such a brilliant, marvelous actor.
19:03 "He has depths I've never seen before,"
19:05 instead of us just wondering if he spent much of lockdown
19:08 watching Jeff Goldblum in the fly.
19:10 Mercifully, it appears that Breen
19:12 has actually taken some advice on board,
19:14 because this doesn't have the sex or nudity
19:16 that was inside Breen's earlier work.
19:18 He does still have a love interest, though, perplexingly.
19:22 About 2/3 of the way through the movie,
19:25 the blonde doctor, because Breen has a type,
19:28 suddenly starts fooling for Cade.
19:31 This is despite the fact that their relationship
19:33 up until this point was actually quite antagonistic,
19:36 and she didn't trust him,
19:38 but also she was not established
19:40 as being a very nice person to begin with.
19:43 One of the earliest scenes in the movie
19:45 is her very coldly escorting the patients out
19:49 for the road trip,
19:51 and she's literally throwing away the crutches
19:54 they're using to walk on the ground
19:56 because they won't fit in the car.
19:59 This is meant to be the romantic interest of the movie.
20:02 And then we get this love scene between her and Cade,
20:07 which is them wandering out into the woods
20:10 onto this little bridge,
20:13 and then I guess they kneel down together?
20:16 It is the most chaste, G-rated love scene
20:20 you'll ever see outside of conservative Christian media.
20:23 It is a really bewildering scene to witness,
20:27 not least of which because both actors
20:29 still appear to be deeply, deeply uncomfortable
20:33 being this close together,
20:35 and honestly, they just want it to stop.
20:37 And one of them is the director.
20:39 Thankfully for bad movie fans,
20:41 the movie picks up in its final act
20:43 when Cade finally decides to train the patients
20:45 to fight back.
20:47 One of the few amenities the patients
20:48 of the hospital are afforded is a Casio keyboard,
20:51 of all things.
20:52 So there are several scenes devoted to one of the patients
20:55 just playing around with a Casio keyboard
20:57 for an extended period of time.
20:59 And this culminates in something
21:01 that I don't think anyone would have predicted
21:03 in my screening,
21:04 in that there is a Casio keyboard dance number.
21:08 Yes, that's right.
21:09 There is a Casio keyboard musical number
21:13 towards the end of this movie.
21:14 And if you expected a lot of poorly coordinated,
21:18 awkward dancing against a green screen
21:20 just composited all together,
21:22 congratulations, you collect your prize
21:25 of having to watch this for several minutes straight.
21:28 It is hilarious.
21:30 That's the culmination of a training montage
21:33 where Cade teaches his students martial arts.
21:35 And if you thought their dance moves were uncoordinated,
21:38 you should see their high kicks.
21:40 I think I've seen better coordination
21:41 in a bunch of three-year-olds
21:43 than some of the actors playing the patients.
21:45 Those kicks are just hilariously awkward and lurchy,
21:49 and they get even funnier
21:51 the more Breen recycles them over and over again,
21:55 just looping them like a GIF file over and over again,
21:59 especially by the time the film's climax,
22:02 which almost has to be seen to be believed,
22:05 this mass battle scene that exists almost entirely
22:08 in one continuous shot,
22:10 where it seems like Breen is trying to see
22:12 just how many timelines he can stack in his editing package.
22:16 So you just have these looped animations
22:18 over and over again for a whole mass of characters.
22:22 And of course, Breen has no shame
22:24 in just recycling elements.
22:26 So Breen in the corner there is just him recycling footage
22:31 from the beginning of the movie fighting bad guys,
22:34 and now he's just fighting the same bad guys
22:36 at the end of the movie,
22:37 because I guess that's a good way of cost-cutting.
22:40 And then, just to make the film even more recycled,
22:44 the final scene of the movie is literally
22:47 the same final scene as the end of "Twisted Pair."
22:51 He even does the E.T. thing,
22:54 where he does, "I'll be right here
22:57 "with the lens flare finger."
22:59 He actually does that for a second time in this movie,
23:04 and the effect is less E.T.
23:06 and more reminiscent of a Burns for All Seasons.
23:10 - Your egotism.
23:11 - Self-indulgent tripe.
23:12 - "Cade the Tortured Crossing" is another example
23:14 of why Neil Breen's films straddle that line
23:17 between being fascinating train wrecks
23:20 and completely unwatchable.
23:22 This is not something for a casual bad movie fan.
23:26 Certainly, it's not going to be your first bad movie.
23:30 This is something that you'd need
23:31 to build up the fortitude to watch.
23:33 You need to watch this with people
23:35 that will probably riff it with you
23:37 to try and get through those long, boring stretches.
23:40 But believe me, when you get to the hilarious moments,
23:44 it'll feel worth it.
23:46 If you're a Breen fan, you'll find so much to enjoy,
23:50 if that is entirely the right word.
23:53 And certainly for me, it was definitely an experience
23:56 I won't be forgetting any time soon.
24:00 Neil Breen is definitely the modern-day equivalent
24:03 of Ed Wood, and let's just hope, for all our sakes,
24:06 he never becomes self-aware.
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24:47 Until next time, I'm Matthew Buck, fading out.
24:52 (dramatic music)
24:54 (whooshing)