When a boy catches fire after incurring the wrath of one of his fellow female students, Cade poses as a gym coach to find out if there is an alien influence involved.
Catering for the kind of audience that likes to see nubile young girls in school uniform or gym kit running in slow motion, Breeding Ground shows First Wave getting stuck into something of a rut. Alien experiment occurs, Cade investigates, alien experiment is exposed, aliens are killed, a couple of new believers are created. In the beginning, it seems like an attempt to redo Carrie, but when the film is mentioned it seems another idea is being planned.
There's nothing really new in the ideas on offer here; genetic tampering seems to crop up in most Sci-Fi shows nowadays at some point, and we learn little of what has actually been done to Julia. The aliens want to test her, but we are never told how.
For a change, the aliens are revealed early on, and the actress who plays Julia gives her an air of underlying danger and threat while making her seem outwardly normal. Or at least as normal as most teenagers. She could actually be a useful ally to Cade with her powers, but this is ignored to show her going off with her mother, despite everything that's happened, and the fact that she's still been altered. In fact the whole ending is rather sudden, the alien is despatched too easily, the second one is never seen again, and there is no mention of the ramifications of events. It just comes to something of a dead stop. There's nothing wrong with the idea, it just isn't executed in a particularly good way.
**
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