| Breed, The Released: 2001 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Vampire Nuts and Bolts: In the distant future, NSA Agent Steven Grant must team up with a vampire detective in order to track down a rouge vampire serial killer. Are these killings just the workings of a raving lunatic or is there a much greater conspiracy at work here? Summary: Okay, so its sometime in the distant future. America is vastly different now, as it no longer relies on municipal police forces to enforce the law. Instead, local law enforcement is governed by the NSA (National Security Agency). The socio-political elements are a lot more rigid than they were in the past and the environment is reminiscent of Fascist Italy during World War II. Here we meet Agent Steven Grant and his partner Phil. Steve and Phil are in the midst of investigating a strange rash of serial murders in the downtown area. They raid an apartment complex to find a blood-soaked girl bound and gagged on the floor. Within the room is a dark cloaked vampire who had just settled down to dine for the evening. The two detectives struggle with the shadowy figure and Phil has his throat ripped open. Steve is tossed out the window and cannot recover in time enough to save Phil nor stop the murderer. Returning to the office he reports his findings to the section chief as well as NSA administrator Seward. Seward informs Grant that what he was facing was a vampire. Naturally, Grant is skeptical of the entire issue. His bosses inform him that there are over 4000 vampires globally and they have recently exposed themselves to public scrutiny in order to establish a truce with the humans. This vampire serial killer's actions greatly threaten the affectability of this truce and as such, they assign Grant to work with vampire detective Aaron Gray (Adrian Paul). Gray explains that the vampires have created a synthetic blood substitute and have evolved beyond having to feed from living humans. Steve and Aaron go to Serenity, the secret vampire city to begin looking for clues. Aaron introduces Grant to Friedrich Wilhelm Cross, the leader of Serenity. Cross orchestrated the peace treaty and he attempts to garner Grant's trust by supplying him with a disk containing a database of all known vampires. Grant is still extremely leery of the vampire populace, and Gray even accuses him of racism. Later that day, Grant returns to NSA headquarters where he meets Doctor Flemming. Flemming is your typical geneticist mad scientist type and he comforts Steve by telling him that if the truce ever failed, the humans would have a backup defense plan. The defense plan comes in the form of an airborne virus. Humans would only suffer minimal symptoms, but vampires would die from its effects within a week. Leaving headquarters, Grant and Gray respond to an emergency call at the Freudian Building. The building houses the apartment of Graf Orlok, one of Cross' lieutenants. They bust up into Orlok's room to discover a young woman named Barbara Steel lying dead upon the floor. Orlok is nowhere to be found. The two begin investigating the surrounding area including the sub level sewer systems. Steve comes upon a furnace containing a leather bound book in the midst of burning. Before anyone can react the vampire killer leaps from the shadows dashing Steve against a wall. Steve gives chase leaving Aaron the nasty chore of fetching the book from the flames of the furnace. The killer however escapes once again. Later on, they take the book back to Flemming who tries to salvage as much of it as he can. He explains that several pages had been ripped out from the book before it was burned. Apparently, it appears to be some sort of ledger. The two detectives find a page detailing an event scheduled to occur on the 20th with someone named Albert P. Now its time to try and track down Graf Orlok. Gray knows that Orlok has close ties to another vampire named Lucy Westenra. They drive down to Lucy's place, which is this huge bad-ass looking castle lying smack-dab in the middle of the city. They ask her about Graf Orlok and she seems surprised to learn that Orlok has turned up missing. She tells them that Orlok had an appointment with a vampire named Alfonse Francois de Boudreaux at his Goth club the Pravda. So it's off to the Pravda they go. The Pravda is basically every nightclub that has ever appeared in a Vampire the Masquerade gaming supplement. Everything is dark, sweaty with naked tattooed titty vamps undulating about to the crunching rhythms of some sort of industrial grunge type of music. Needless to say, Grant and Gray look like a pair of dick-wads amidst the reigning populace of the Pravda. They corner Boudreaux who of course admits nothing about knowing Graf Orlok. Before they can question him further, Aaron sniffs out a familiar scent. Opening up a secret panel he finds a revolutionary vampire named Vladimir West. West is your basic trouble maker type and he's known to be a thorn in the side of Cross' efforts. West is definitely not the type to embrace humanity with open arms. Now while Aaron attempts to interrogate West, who should show up but Graf Orlok himself. Now we embark upon another chase scene. Aaron chases Orlok out of the club with plans on questioning his allegiance to this vampire killer (Or maybe he IS the killer). Orlok gets into his car and tries to run Aaron down. Aaron's body is pitched into some debris and Orlok's car skids out of control crashing into a building. His head is sliced in half. Grant meanwhile, tries to nail West. West leads him on a merry chase outside of the nightclub and across the rooftops of the city's Bohemian settings. Lucy Westenra shows up and knows that Grant doesn't stand a chance against West. Grant manages to shoot the vampire causing him to fall upon a pointed street-lamp but the wily vamp manages to get away. Lucy saves Grant from falling off a window ledge. Grant takes Lucy back to her bad-ass castle and the two spend the night fucking each other. Despite Grant's natural prejudice against vampires, his standards seem to take a back seat where cooter is involved. The next day, Steve and Aaron meet up at a diner. Aaron regales us with his tormented tale of woe and the origins of how he became a vampire. Apparently his family and he were a group of Polish Jews trying to escape Berlin during World War II. They were of captured and tortured in one of Germany's more prized four-star concentration camps. Aaron succeeded in getting his family out but he had not accounted for the rough winter weather. They ran into the woods, but eventually his wife and child perished in the snow. Before expiring, Aaron was approached by Cross who turned him into a vampire and sent him back to Berlin. Aaron tracked down the Nazi soldiers who tormented his family and tore them apart. After detailing his life story to Grant, the two decide to check on their next lead. This would be an effeminate vamp named Dean Fusco. Fusco knows a little bit about Orlok's relationship to West. It seems as if Orlok had betrayed Cross and Serenity in favor of doing smuggling operations with West. Fusco doesn't reveal a lot, but he knows that a major smuggling operation (Presumably weapons) is set to occur on the 20th. Big deal right, we already knew that thanks to Orlok's account ledger. Gray eventually divines the identity of Albert P. Albert P actually stands for Albert Pier and is the location for the operation set for the 20th. Fusco also names Lucy Westenra as the ringleader of the event. Grant has a difficult time believing that his little piece of tail could possibly be the master of a massive vampire smuggling operation. Grant and Gray split up to go intercept the operation. Grant reports his findings to Seward and tells them that he may need backup. Seward wants to charge in guns blazing, but Grant doesn't want him to do that. He goes down to Albert Pier where he finds Lucy overseeing the operation. Meeting up with Aaron the two discover that the vamps are NOT smuggling weapons into the country. Instead, they are trying to smuggle vampires OUT of the country. The NSA SWAT team arrives and the bullets start flying. Lucy and Aaron think that Grant has betrayed them and they take up arms against the soldiers. Eventually, the entire adventure ends in a bloodbath involving Grant, Aaron, Lucy, the NSA and even West. Grant returns to headquarters to discover that despite this entire fiasco, the vampire serial killer is still on the loose. His section chief informs him that the murderer has kidnapped his daughter. As such, the NSA has decided to launch their viral weapon over the city eliminating all of the vampires. Grant can't believe his ears. Despite his best efforts, he can't convince his boss how piss-poor of an idea this is. He rushes down to Serenity to warn Aaron. [WARNING: The identity of the serial killer will NOW be revealed!] Aaron still blames Grant for the massacre on the pier and is not very responsive to him. Grant manages to eventually warn him of the NSA's plans. Aaron goes underground to report his findings to Cross. Cross reveals his true colors and slices Aaron across the throat. It is now revealed that Cross is actually the serial killer. Grant meanwhile, races back to HQ in an effort to stop Flemming from releasing the virus into the atmosphere. Flemming was expecting Grant and reveals the true nature behind the virus. He had lied on his reports to the NSA. The virus will make vampires sick but ultimately they will survive. Humans however will die within a week. Flemming had been working on the project in secret for Cross. Cross had promised to turn him into a vampire if he perfected this virus. Cross arrives and kills Flemming. He captures Steve and takes him back to his secret lair. Steve wakes up to find himself in a plastic prison next to Aaron. Aaron has been nearly bled dry and will need to feed soon. Cross does the James Bond ending and reveals his entire plan. He had orchestrated the virus so that humanity stood on the edge of extinction. However, he had already created a cure for the disease culled from the blood of vampires. The end result would be that all people on the planet would now be vampires; one race, one breed. He needed to play the part of a blood-hungry serial killer in order to scare the NSA enough so that they would feel that releasing the virus was necessary. (The section chief's daughter is also here by the way.) Aaron and Grant manage to burst out of their plastic prison and attack Cross. They chase each other all throughout the compound until they come to the armory. Aaron tries to crack Cross across the face with the butt of a rifle, but Cross smacks him away. Grant manages to find a hand grenade and he punches the weapon up into a hole in Cross' stomach. The vampire explodes and everything is fine and dandy in the world. The following day, the human/vampire truce is strengthened and Gray is made Grant's permanent partner. Grant continues to shag-bang Lucy Westenra who has since forgiven him for fucking up the whole blood-sucking foreign student exchange. Acting/Dialogue: The acting is pretty poor in this. Bokeem Woodbine plays the part of Steven Grant and its hilarious watching him try and imitate Wesley Snipes' grim character from Blade. His dialogue sounds really forced and his inexperience in playing this type of roll is really obvious. He spends more time trying to be a Tone Loc wannabe instead of trying to play a character that has even a marginal amount of depth to them. Adrian Paul seems to have a knack for playing immortal characters. Unless you've been living on the planet Zeist for the past decade, you'll recognize him as being the thespian that brought to life the ever-dashing and suave character of Duncan MacLeod from the Highlander TV series. Adrian does a halfway decent job at playing a polish vampire (There's a joke here somewhere) but he really falls in love with the camera a little too much when it comes to the action scenes. During the fight sequences, he becomes a total ham and tires desperately to squeeze every tiny drip of 'macho' as he can out of his role. Yes he even does the ever-popular but scientifically impossible Leap Across the Air and Slide Along the Floor While Firing Two Guns At the Villain routine. This maneuver probably would have been passable had he actually managed to hit anything. There also seems to be a stigma that affects many horror films in which no-name actors try a little TOO hard to act like a vampire. These traits usually involve rough gravely voices, maniacal laughter and over-extenuated dramatic pauses. I guess they all figure, "Hell if Tom Cruise can play a vampire, then by-golly gosh-darn so can I!" The actors playing Cross and West are the primary victims of this syndrome. West feels the need to cackle incessantly while baiting Agent Grant to chase him. I guess he was meant to be a bad ass rebel-with-a-cause sort of vampire, but he merely came off as a cheeky and irritating little bag of snot. The only one in the whole cast who really impressed me was Ling Bai as Lucy Westenra. She came across as cool and sexy every bit as alluring as a vampire seductress is meant to be. The dialogue overall is nothing to rave about. Trite and clichéd, I get the impression that the director's dyslexic twelve-year-old son was hired as line producer. Gore: Considering that this is a movie about vampires with six shooters, there's not really a lot of gore in this one. We see a couple bloody bodies laying on the floor and Orlok and Cross have some interesting looking death scenes. Not much to rave about beyond that however. Guilty Pleasures: Well, this movie features a vampire night club, what do YOU think? We see some gyrating leather bitches showing off their ta-ta's and Lucy reveals her ass to the camera as well. Ladies might enjoy watching Bokeem Woodbine with his shirt off during the Grant/Lucy sex scene. In truth, we get a better performance from his abs than we do from the rest of him. The Good: The Breed is the type of film that SHOULD have been great, but ultimately can only be labeled as 'not-shitty'. Director Michael Oblowitz really excels at providing some great gothic atmosphere. This flick is a vampire role player's wet fucking dream. The set designs are extraordinary and are a perfect compliment to the futuristic noir feel that Oblowitz is trying to portray here. Lucy Westenra lives in this big-ass mansion and it is without a doubt the COOLEST fucking house I have ever seen in a horror movie. I really can't stress enough how overwhelmed I was with this particular set. The movie is worth renting just for this scene alone. I also really dug the shots of Serenity as well as the neighborhood surrounding (and including) the Pravda. Oblowitz also gives a lot of props to famous vamp films of the past. There are MANY references to be found here. The character of Graf Orlok was named after the Dracula character from F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic Nosferatu. As such, Ling Bai's character Lucy was named for the heroine of that same piece. Classically Lucy Westenra's name would become anglicized for future versions of Dracula. The dickwad NSA chief is named Seward, another character from the famous Bram Stoker novel, Dracula. There is also a character named Doctor Bathory. In the 16th century there was a Hungarian countess named Elizabeth Bathory who routinely drank and bathed in the blood of virgins in an effort to acquire immortality. The female victim found at Orlok's apartment was named Barbara Steele. Barbara Steele is the name of an actress who was a popular scream queen in European horror films such as Black Sunday, The Specter, Castle of Blood and Curse of the Crimson Alter. Once again, writers decide to play footloose and fancy free when it comes to Vampirism 101. In this mythos, direct sunlight is really little more than a mild irritation to vampires. Crosses, garlic, holy water and all of the other traditional vampire wards don't do dick. Even a stake in the heart is pretty much useless. The only way to kill these fuckers is to either decapitate them or pretty much fuck them up beyond all possible recognition. They refer to themselves as the Breed because they are basically a genetic offshoot of humanity. Normally I would have great issue with someone trying to tear the vampire ideology so far away from its supernatural roots, but for the sake of this particular story it works fine I suppose. The overall story behind the Breed is pretty solid. The framing fails in a lot of areas but as a whole, I like the direction that they took with this. Nothing is really left to surprise, and you can usually get to step 2 of the investigative process ten minutes before Grant and Gray can, but its still fun to watch the mystery unravel. The story presented here is really too complex to be unfolded within the time frame of an hour and a half movie. This sort of plot would be better served as a television series than a finite movie. There are too many characters, histories and variables thrown our way and there is no way that the director could flesh out all these elements in the time frame allowed. The Bad: At its core, the Breed tries to take every over-used plot device and weave into one organic never-ending cliché. And these clichés don't merely extend to the dialogue either. It extends to nearly every aspect of this film. As I'm watching it I'm mouthing the lines along with the actors because I already know (from having watched hundreds of vampire as well as buddy-cop bang bang shoot-em-ups) exactly what the characters are going to say. At one point, I was sure that Bokeem was readying himself to quote Ezekiel 25:17. There's also an over-used trick that I have found in many low-budget action flicks. What do you do when a heavy action sequence is required and the producer spent his last five bucks on a Spanish whore he found on the corner of Atlantic and Georgia Avenue? Why, use the good ole Slow motion techniques of course! I always cringe whenever I see slow-mo used these days, because it's a tool that seems to get abused more often than an alter boy on a slow Sunday. The fight scenes involve some REALLY weak looking cable techniques. In fact, I don't think they even had enough money to spring for an actual wire-frame apparatus. I think they just fastened the fan belt from an old Bentley around the actors and hoisted them up onto a clothes line. Hell, even Charlie's Angels provided more realistic fight scenes than this movie could. I've already spoken a little about Adrian's belly-churning macho scenes, but they get even worse when we see him down on the pier. He leaps through the air pirouetting, and spinning into a double half-gainer as if he were Brian Boitano and Greg Louganis' bastard love child. (Do I need to mention that this was all done in slow motion?). Upon landing on the pier, he bears his kewl fangs and growls menacingly as he withdraws his kewl looking guns from his kewl looking holster and he emits this really kewl growl as he blasts away all the other kewl looking vamps with the afore mentioned kewl guns and the whole thing is just so damn…well…kewl. Ya see what I'm getting at? I know that there are many directors who fall into the trap of prioritizing style over substance, but just what the hell do you do when you possess neither? As I'm watching this movie I slowly began to realize what it was that I was actually viewing. A couple of overweight guys with bad acne sat down with their Vampire the Masquerade role playing books and a bag of Cheet-ohs and spent the evening pretending that they were involved in some manly angst-ridden sex noir gothic pulp novel. They wrote the whole thing down and submitted it to Columbia/Tri-Star where it was likely discarded or neatly tucked between a submission editor's desk and his waste-paper basket. The non-English speaking illegal immigrant custodian emptied the waste paper basket that night where upon the *ahem* manuscript spilled over onto the floor. Being a swarthy and un-attentive sort of custodian, he likely stepped on the thing with his left foot, which invariably would be adorned with the required quantities of leftover bubble gum. He trounced around with the thing stuck to his shoe leaving pages fluttering about hurly burly as he made his rounds. The following morning, a movie producer, hung over and pondering the name of the whore that he bought a gram of cocaine from before shagging the prior evening chanced upon the Hubba-Bubba laden pages that were strewn about the office break room. Collecting them together, he likely read the first few pages of the draft through a dry eyed haze of middle aged malt liquor sluggishness. And thus the script for the Breed was born. Now I've spent a lot of time here bashing this flick, but in truth I've seen a lot worse. Once more we are featured with a never-to-be-classic that epitomizes the old adage of 'Style Over Substance'. Christ, not only is the movie a rampant cliché, but my criticisms are as well! There's a lot of good stuff going here, and it really had the potential to be a really kick-ass flick. Despite its many fallbacks, some lonely and culturally deprived sex-starved people may even find themselves entertained by this film. Kewl Lines: Adrian Paul had ALL the kewl lines! Everything he said was super kewl and when he mouthed off to Grant…that was really kewl and even when he was snarling at Cross, that was ULTRA super kewl and…and…awww hell. Just go rent the fucking movie. Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 severed heads. |
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