The Dumpster Dive: The Breed (2001)

April 3, 2018 Mike Annerino Reviews

From Orca to Out of The Dark, I’ve been very lucky with what I’ve watched for The Dumpster Dive so far. Because of that, this month I specifically set out to find some real garbage. From the cover, I initially thought today’s movie would be an Aliens rip off. After reading the synopsis for The Breed, I realized that this was the type of Blade/The Matrix rip-off that plagued video store shelves across the world in the early 2000s.

The Breed follows two cops, one human (Bokeem Woodbine) and one vampire (Adrian Paul), who must hunt down a rogue vampire who is murdering people around the city. In a world where vampires have begun to come from the shadows to integrate into society, you will be very bored and want to watch Daybreakers instead.

This movie feels like a very obvious result of Blade and The Matrix being as big as they were in the late ’90s. It’s like a lesser version of Equilibrium, which is ironic considering Equilibrium was released one year after The Breed. The movie is also two years older than Underworld, so you can’t even say it ripped that off. If anything, the filmmakers of The Breed were probably kind of pissed when they saw the box office returns for Underworld as compared to The Breed, which I’m assuming went straight to DVD.
I’ve been naming all of the films that The Breed reminds me of, though one of the few things I didn’t find awful early on was the world building. It’s a cheap Blade rip-off but at least they attempt to try to set up some kind of world. Granted, there isn’t much of a payoff but I’m trying to give compliments where I can with a movie as dull as this.
I like Bokeem Woodbine, but he’s fucking horrible in this. His delivery, his facial expressions, it’s all terrible. It’s one of the most hilariously bad performance I’ve ever seen, certainly by someone who has gone on to do the great things that Bokeem Woodbine has. Say what you will about movies like Devil and the Total Recall remake but Woodbine is one of the best performances, if not the best performance, in both of those films. Woodbine also recently delivered solid performances in the show Fargo and last year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, he’s proven to be a great supporting actor when the filmmakers know what to do with him. The best scene in the whole movie involves a character named Boudreaux, it’s legitimately funny and John Durbin brings a sense of life to the performance that I wish was in the other performances. I can give a pass to Bai Ling and Adrian Paul because they’re going for the cliche vampire performance, but everyone else is just straight-up bored.  That’s the problem with the performances in the movie, much like the movie itself, they are all standard straight-to-DVD performances.

When I begin watching a movie like this, I’m not expecting great performances or stories but if you can excite me with action then I’m fine. Is the action of The Breed worth a watch? No. Fuck no. The action is incredibly awkward. The slow motion, the dialogue, the editing, the music, every action scene is a fucking cavalcade of nonsense. Thankfully, it’s more hilariously bad than dull. The wire work is so obnoxious that if you turned the movie on in the middle of one of the action scenes, you may think that you had just turned on a spoof movie in the vein of Kung Pow: Enter The Fist. This movie wants to be cool so badly that it even rips off the action cliche of jumping through the air and shooting two pistols before sliding across the floor, the instant making of a badass, or so the early-2000s thought.

At the end of the day, is this a hidden gem or could it be tossed back into the dumpster?

VERDICT: TOSS IT!

While this isn’t the worst movie in the world, it’s really not worth your time. If you like having some beers with friends and laughing at a bad movie, it would do the job fine but I think there are better options out there for you to indulge in. Like I said before, you know what movie you’re getting into when you see the poster and read the synopsis. It has its laughably bad moments but the main bulk of the film is a buddy cop mystery that is insanely dull, especially when you’re waiting for that third act to wrap up.

 

If you’d like to suffer through The Breed, it’s available to Rent/Buy on Amazon or Vudu.

 

About Mike Annerino 28 Articles
Horror has always kind of loomed over me without becoming a big influence on my life until a few years ago. I sort of always accidentally fell into a horror film-viewing experience, at parties or friends houses and such, but I always had this secret love with fear, found something fun and fascinating about it. These past few years I’ve been playing catch up and discovering everything I’ve missed in horror, a genre that is constantly being inventive and fun to watch. The embodiment of nightmares, which gives way for infinite possibilities. It’s easily become my favorite genre

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