NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bombs #1, 2, and 3: The Neil Breen Trilogy - DOUBLE DOWN (2005), I AM HERE....NOW (2009), and FATEFUL FINDINGS (2013)

To be mentioned in the same breath as Tommy Wiseau is probably not a crowning achievement if you're an aspiring auteur, as writer-director-producer-actor-composer-editor-costumer-caterer Neil Breen clearly is.  But seeing as his Fateful Findings is attracting the same kind of midnight-showing attention that The Room once commanded, that is Breen's destiny.

I don't know quite how he feels about that notoriety, but it is beyond his help.  He shares with Tommy Wiseau a totally earnest commitment to his ideas, as well as a complete and utter blindness to his own dearth of talent.



But make no mistake: Neil Breen has something to say and he's going to say it, even if he has to write, direct, act, and cater it himself. Fateful Findings is the work of a man who's trying to make the Great American Movie.  What's it about?  It's about everything.  Life.  Friendship.  Romance.  Danger.  Politics.  Corruption.  Addiction.  Mental health.  The Constitution.  Mysticism.  Ghosts.  And Neil Breen is the only one who understands them all.

Oops, I meant "Dylan." Breen plays Dylan, our hero, a bestselling author/computer scientist extraordinaire/extremely handsome man of action and mystery.  He heroically shrugs off calls from his publisher for a new book, turning his focus instead to hacking into "secret government and corporate secrets" (his words).  But someone in the government isn't too happy with what he's been finding...

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.  The movie begins with Dylan being hit by a car (in an effect which is, considering the number of clumsy hit-by-car sequences that make their way into much more professional movies these days, not bad).  As he recovers in the hospital, he finds he's being visited by spirits, and may have been given special abilities...

Wait, I'm still getting ahead of the movie.  We meet Dylan as a child as he's frolicking through the forest with his best friend Leah.  They find a magic box hidden under a mushroom, with magic stones inside.  Leah moves away and a voice-over narration tells us that Dylan never sees her again... until she turns out to be his doctor after he's hit by the car.

If that made up the entirety of the movie's plot, it would be busy enough.  But Breen endeavors to make a film made up entirely of tangentially related sub-plots.  I haven't even mentioned the neighbors with the troubled sex life, their daughter who has a crush on Dylan, Dylan's wife and her pill addiction, or the two psychoanalysts who somehow play into Dylan's mystical quest.  All of the plots exist mostly to glorify Breen, who gives himself not one but two attractive love interests, and writes himself plenty of makeout scenes with both.

Virtually none of the plot threads are resolved, nor are they meant to be.  The only conclusive moment of the film comes in a third-act press conference, in front of a green-screen image of what might be the Supreme Court, in which Dylan announces to an invisible but very audibly cheering crowd that he's, indeed, been hacking into governments and corporations all over the world, and what has he found?  Greed, corruption, deception, etc.  Breen isn't even interested in telling us what kind of corruption he's found.  He simply cuts to a montage of reactions from four or five representatives of the corporate world, and what they do next is something I will leave for you to experience.  I have to admit, I was floored.

Fateful Findings is a rare bad movie that I'd recommend to everyone, not just masochists like myself.  It's truly captivating in its loopiness, and if Breen doesn't wear any of his hats particularly well--he's less a jack than a two-of-all-trades--he stacks enough themes on top of one another so that the film is never boring.  It's no surprise that he makes up most of the creative crew for the film; no one, upon seeing this script, would have agreed to collaborate with him on this.


If Breen's two previous films represent the same paranoid, self-aggrandizing vision, they unfortunately don't have the same gonzo energy.  In his debut, Double Down, he casts himself as Aaron Brand, a notorious computer hacker (Breen himself is an architect, and I can picture him delivering a Peter Cook-style monologue called "I would have rather been a hacker than an architect") who lives in the desert near Las Vegas because the government is trying to kill him.  They've already assassinated his girlfriend: a sniper takes her out while she and Aaron are both naked by his pool (with nudity awkwardly obscured).  He's visited by her spirit occasionally, so he can tell her things like "Thank you for loving me."

Double Down is, unfortunately, the most focused and professional-looking of the three.  Breen is also the superhero of this film, and the fact that Aaron Brand is essentially a domestic terrorist who threatens 9/11-style attacks on Las Vegas several times poses the question of whether Breen means for him to be an antihero, or he didn't think much about those implications.  I'd vote the latter, especially since Aaron seems to have hints of the same spiritual power that Dylan has in Fateful Findings.  If Double Down is generally more restrained than that film is, Breen restricts himself much less as an actor; while in Findings he has to remain stoic and mild-tempered, here he allows himself some wonderfully unhinged moments in which he runs through the desert screaming.


Seeing as Breen has viewed himself as infallible so far, it's only fitting that in his second film, I Am Here....Now (4-period ellipsis his), he literally plays God.  Clad in white robes, He returns to earth, looks at what man has made of it, and states clearly early in the film that he is "disappointed" in our "speechies," as he puts it.  We've ruined the planet and allowed corporations to buy our government.  Breen-God walks around Las Vegas helping the needy and meting out some Old Testament-style punishment to the wicked.

On the surface, this is an interesting premise, but overall I Am Here....Now is probably the nadir of Breen's not-exactly-illustrious three-film career.  Even though Breen has a history of writing himself into romantic relationships with seemingly much younger women (even while playing God), I Am Here....Now is the only film that reveals a truly nasty misogynist streak, in a sub-plot that follows a woman who is laid off from an unspecified job at a green energy company and has no choice but to become a hooker.  I know, I know--he's making a point about how corporations have the power to make or break us, yadda yadda yadda--but it's hard to imagine it playing this way if it were a male character.

The scenes which are meant to depict the horrors of gang violence are just as culturally illiterate.  Breen's idea of a gang culture is a bunch of dudes hanging around a condemned building, most of them carrying machine guns openly, occasionally punching each other in the face or shooting each other for no real reason.  A scene in which a character's hand is cut off, meant to be disturbing, is not far removed from Evil Dead 2.

Breen's lack of talent for storytelling is evident through all three films, since he elects mostly to dictate it to us rather than show it.  He never shows us what he's hacking into; he merely tells us about it (and then hurls some laptops around his office).  He can't show us the type of corruption being committed by corporatists; he has to have them muse at length about their crimes.  An example:

Businessman #1: "Now that we've paid off our fellow elected representatives in the legislature, that environmental solar panel development bill will fail next week."

Businessman #2: "Not to mention the cash it'll put in our pockets."

Of the three, only Fateful Findings avoids falling prey to the tell-don't-show method, and that's only because the plot is so ridiculous that it defies any explanation.

Still, Breen is an auteur.  His films all have a clear through-line about corporate greed and environmental stewardship, as well as the reawakening of adolescent romance (I'm guessing Breen had a childhood sweetheart he never reconnected with).  Strange motifs reappear with justification known only to Breen.  For instance, scenes in each film feature characters lying face down with their arms above their heads; it looks just weird enough to have been done on purpose.  As a matter of fact, that's a good summation of most of Breen's work: just weird enough to have been done on purpose.

WE HARDLY KNEW 'THEE: The Films of Alan Smithee, Part 1: HELLRAISER:BLOODLINE (1996)

When a director wants to escape his or her own movie, Alan Smithee is there to open the hatch. 

Hellraiser: Bloodline, the fourth in the series, was the first Smithee film I ever watched, when I was a teenager. Having been an avid Fangoria reader, I knew about the film's troubled production, and was an admirer of the actual director, Kevin Yagher. Yagher was a top-of-the-line animatronics and puppetry effects creator, most famous for designing the Cryptkeeper and directing the opening and closing segments of "Tales from the Crypt."

The film was taken out of his hands during production, and the script by Peter Atkins (who'd been on board the series since part II) was heavily rewritten. Whole subplots, like one featuring Kenneth Tobey of The Thing from Another World, we're dropped. Joe Chappelle, whose name was already mud among horror fans for ruining Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, was brought in to fill in the gaps. (To be fair, Chappelle has done some good things since, having directed many episodes of "Fringe" as well as the enjoyable Phantoms, in which Lawrence of Arabia teams up with Ray Donovan and the director of Argo to fight an ancient subterranean life form.)

So what's left of Hellraiser: Bloodline is a mess, but, upon recent rewatch, I was surprised to find it an entirely watchable mess. The plot is incoherent, as are the philosophical ramblings of the villainous Pinhead (Doug Bradley), who sounds like H.P. Lovecraft would if he were high at a Phish concert. But it's quickly paced and occasionally inventive in its sadism. 

We begin in space. Yep, in space.  Aboard the space station Minos, Dr. John Merchant (Bruce Ramsay) opens a puzzle box which fans of the series will find familiar.  The crew wonders what he's up to.  Explaining that he is attempting to destroy a demon, he tells the story of the construction of the puzzle box, from the distant past to the relative present and then back to the future, where the demon Pinhead is confronted.

Thanks likely to postproduction tinkering, the story structure is awkward, beginning in the 22nd century, flashing back to the 18th century, to the future again, to the 1990s, and then again to the 22nd century for the finale.  It doesn't help that the dull Ramsay appears as the protagonist in all three settings; he has the demeanor of a kinder, gentler Billy Zane, but fails to conjure any character or personality to go along with the demonic torture.

The film also shows little evidence of the talent of Adam Scott, who reportedly enjoyed working on the film but betrays none of that enjoyment on the screen.  As an 18th-century gentleman who (thinks he) enslaves a demonic princess (Valentina Vargas), the future Mr. Leslie Knope exists for a few dull scenes before he makes an inauspicious exit, though not before proudly displaying one of the Laughable Haircuts of Film History.

Not even hell on earth will stop the Catalina Wine Mixer.

The film hops on to a present-day architect (also Ramsay) who unwittingly designs a building-sized replica of the puzzle box that could be the pathway for all manner of demons. It's here that Pinhead makes his first appearance, threatening the architect's wife (the underused Kim Myers, of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and young son (Courtland Mead, best known as the really irritating Danny from Stephen King's miniseries of The Shining). 

Though the film is by no means a cohesive piece of anything, it's probably the best of the Hellraiser sequels so far, if we don't count Scott Derrickson's surprisingly decent Hellraiser: Inferno, which is barely related to the series at all. Bloodline's underlying pretentiousness elevates it above your usual run-of-the-mill sequel hackery. The finished product is a total disaster, but it's clear that somebody at some point had high expectations for this movie. You don't see the kind of high-minded philosophizing that spews from Pinhead's mouth in a Friday the 13th movie. 

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 4: UNFRIENDED (2015)

Unfriended may not be the scariest piece of first-person-shot candy corn out there, but it is, especially for a low-budget 82-minute Blum House entry, ingeniously constructed.  It uses a premise that's almost unworkable, taking place completely within one person's computer screen and telling its story in real time via Skype, iMessage, Facebook, Spotify, and all manner of variations on the millennial self-contained social network center.  Less ambitious movies tend either to fail to make this sort of thing interesting, or to cheat and take the point of view elsewhere.  Give Unfriended credit: it never strays from the computer screen, and it held my interest long enough that I never felt like checking Facebook myself.

The first sequence is remarkable in its simplicity: an unseen computer user idly wanders toward a LiveLeak (read: banned from YouTube) link called "Laura Barns Suicide." Then, like every good Wikipedia user, we click through to what is labeled as the video that caused her suicide.  It's aptly named "LAURA BARNS KILL URSELF." We see the first few seconds--footage of the titular Laura, very drunk, talking trash about someone at a party--before a boyfriend's Skype call butts in and we're forced to pause.

This shot sets the premise for the rest of the film, which we see from the point of view of a short-attention-spanned teenager named Blaire (Shelley Hennig).  The first-person storytelling is handled brilliantly as Blaire clicks back and forth among Skype conversations, instant messages, songs, websites, et cetera, which in the hands of director Leo Gabriadze never feels inauthentic.  Blaire is joined remotely by boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) as well as friends Adam (Will Peltz), Jess (Renee Olstead), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Val (Courtney Halverson), as well as a mysterious seventh person who somehow butts into their Skype conversation, won't hang up, and taunts them with otherworldly threats.

It isn't particularly scary--the characters are crudely drawn and the plot is ridiculous--but it's surprisingly a lot of fun. The actors wisely play the whole thing straight; any winking at the audience would ruin the movie entirely. Rather than take an ironic position themselves, the filmmakers let the kids' ironic detachment play into the story, as we occasionally see first-person user Blaire type something honest, pause to think about it, then delete it and type "LOL."

In the end it doesn't quite come together, as the manifestation of the ghost is just too silly and the characters are just too unlikable. But there's real skill at work here: the makers of Unfriended tried something risky, and it paid off. 

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 3: THE HARVEST (2013)

John McNaughton doesn't make films so often anymore, so any release of his is usually worth more than a cursory glance, especially since he's one of those directors like Alan Parker or James Mangold who refuse to be pigeonholed into one genre.  He started with possibly the most brutal serial killer film ever made (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), went on to make a wacky splatter comedy in which an alien occupies human bodies and makes their heads explode (The Borrower), then followed with a dark comedy (Mad Dog and Glory) and a twisty-turny noir thriller (Wild Things).  Other than some selected TV work, that's about it.

With The Harvest he returns to horror, but not the ruthless terror of Henry or the goofiness of The Borrower; rather, he shoots for a more sentimental, tragic horror.  It is a story about two monsters who have become monsters out of necessity.  It should be no surprise that one of them is played by Michael Shannon, who is able to exude a single-minded amoral determination and utter helplessness at the same time.

Shannon is Richard and Samantha Morton is his wife Katherine.  She is a doctor and he has quit his job to spend more time with their son Andy (Charlie Tahan), who is ailing of an unspecified but debilitating disease which renders him barely able to walk.  It's getting worse.

Meanwhile, Maryann (Natasha Calis, of Possession) moves in next door with her grandparents and swiftly befriends Andy.  Trouble is that his parents--mostly Katherine--are suspicious about letting anyone get too close to Andy, and it becomes apparent that they're hiding something.

The first half of the film is brilliant.  The relationship between the two kids is charming and believable.  Morton takes a cue from Bette Davis and plays Katherine as a woman who might seem irrational and shrewish, but is hiding a desperation.  Shannon is her complement, a man who is sincerely devoted to his son but sadly doubtful that his efforts will save him.  There's a great Hitchcock-like sequence in which Maryann tries to sneak Andy out for a game of catch, the ending of which is somehow both surprising and inevitable.

Once the entire plot is revealed, the movie loses its way, especially when Morton stops being the overprotective mother and becomes a typical psychopath.  The transition is not quite as seamless as it should be.  Even though the movie never becomes nihilistic, it leaves us wishing it had gone a more thoughtful route.  It may have made a more effective one-hour TV episode than a full-length movie, but it's still worth a look for its two likable leads, and for Shannon.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 2: AREA 51 (2015)

I was really hoping Oren Peli wouldn't be a one-trick pony, but Area 51, the director's second feature after his explosive Paranormal Activity, is so similar to that previous film that it barely has any real reason for existence.  It's skillfully made and entertaining, but it hits too many of the same notes.

The basic premise is the same: overly curious people tread where they shouldn't, gravely overestimate their intelligence, and film themselves facing the consequences.  This time instead of a haunting, it's possible alien activity and government conspiracies.  When Reid (Reid Warner) disappears from a party one night and reappears a few hours later without any idea where he's been, he and his two buddies launch an investigation into the titular government facility, leading up to an attempted break-in during which the three friends find more than they bargained for.

Because Peli is a good filmmaker, much of the break-in itself and its aftermath are appropriately tense, with a few well-placed surprises.  But the film doesn't have the slow-burn build to inevitability that Paranormal had, and it doesn't help that none of the three male protagonists is all that likable.  The ending does have one very well-executed first-person shot that I admittedly hadn't seen before, but where the closing scene of Paranormal still resonates even now, this one barely buzzes.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 1: THE NIGHTMARE (2015)

The Nightmare is both a documentary and a horror film.  That double-identity is difficult to pull off, and many have tried.  I've grown tired of "true story" horror films which try to have their cake and eat it too, assuring the audience of their veracity while fudging real events to make them spookier (see The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Deliver Us from Evil, The Conjuring, The Amityville Horror).

The Nightmare does not do that.  It's not about scary ghosts but scary experiences.  Its people are haunted not by spirits but by something in their own minds that is beyond their understanding.

We meet eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis.  Each has had, with varying frequency, crippling vivid nightmares in which he or she finds himself or herself unable to move as frightening things happen around them.  They are as real as real life, so real that some have trouble telling the difference.

Director Rodney Ascher portrays each nightmare in gut-wrenching first person.  As in his first film, the Shining conspiracy-fan-theory exploration Room 237, there is no explicit directorial voice.  Every word we hear (save for some reenactments) comes from the dreamers.  We experience each dream as it is being narrated to us by its victim.  On a conventional level, it's scary, but the sincerity of the narrator makes it all the more brutal.

I can imagine a decent fictional horror film based around this affliction.  In fact, there was one: Insidious, which is cited by one of the film's subjects as a fairly accurate depiction of the disorder.  It's a naturally terrifying concept.  But Ascher goes a few steps further than merely depicting the subjects' nightmares; he explores the effect the nightmares have on their lives. The questions they raise.  The conclusions they lead to.  The struggles they cause.

I don't know what kind of research has been done on sleep paralysis.  Neither do the afflicted.  They're left to figure it out for themselves.  Most have been told by family and friends that they are "just bad dreams," and nothing to worry about, echoing common unenlightened assumptions about mental illnesses.  We notice that many of the images and sensations in these dreams are consistent among sufferers.  The tall, thin shadow men.  The tingling sensation in their nerves.  The dull, ambient voices.  The small black creature on their chest which could be seen as a cat (an image which dates back at least as far as 1787, in Henry Fuseli's painting "The Nightmare").

But then there are the differences.  Some are overtly threatening, like a mysterious phone call in which an attacker demands to be let into the house.  Others are more ambiguous.  One subject reports a childhood dream in which he sees a bright light and is kidnapped by two tall thin figures.  As an adult, he watches the film Communion and discovers that Whitley Streiber's version of the conventional alien figure looks very similar.  Maybe those who purport to have been abducted by aliens are simply misinterpreting a case of sleep paralysis?  Maybe.

Ascher wisely doesn't provide an answer.  He stays with his eight subjects as they make sense of their own situation.  Some are inspired, as one woman finds her faith when reciting the name "Jesus" brings her out of her dream.  Some feel doomed, as one man is convinced that he will one day die in his sleep because of his paralysis.  He falls asleep every night thinking it might be the night.  And another takes some comfort when she first learns of the concept of sleep paralysis and discovers she's not the only one who suffers from it.  Or as she puts it, quite appropriately, "It's a thing!"

**** out of ****

This Week in Cinemasochism: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (2014)

It's always a shame to see a promising auteur collapse under his own weight. Seth MacFarlane, creator of the occasionally ingenious but now mostly tiresome "Family Guy," took to live action deftly a few years ago with the hilarious Ted. His second feature as director is, sadly, a labor of love: a rare comedy-western that aims to be equally a parody of and a tribute to the classic films MacFarlane loves. But while Ted was funny, smart, and never overstayed its welcome, A Million Ways to Die in the West is repetitive, dumb, and long. When he tries, MacFarlane can be crude without being crass, hip without being too self-referential, and witty without being smug. This film represents two full hours of MacFarlane's worst habits and none of his good ones.

MacFarlane plays Albert Stark, a mouthy but cowardly sheep herder who always finds himself on the wrong end of somebody's fist. He lives in a small frontier town in the late 19th century, and he hates everything about the place and time he lives in. When his doe-eyed girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) dumps him in favor of a handsome mustachioed shop owner (Neil Patrick Harris), he sinks further into depression. But then a gorgeous gunslinger named Anna (Charlize Theron) takes a liking to him, not revealing that she's actually married to Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson), the most vicious gunfighter in the West.

MacFarlane's first mistake--and not his last--was casting himself in the lead role. It's clear what he's trying to do: the key lies within Woody Allen's early work, like Bananas and Love and Death, which placed Woody as a modern-speaking nebbish standing at a right angle to a conventional genre plot.  The difference is that unlike Woody, MacFarlane doesn't have a self-deprecating bone in his body.  He's always putting wisecracks and asides into his character's mouth, but in a way that makes him seem obnoxious and superior rather than charming.  That the strikingly gorgeous Theron is required to fall in love with him at first sight only makes the film more awkward.

Still, Theron is a trooper.  She's the best thing about the film, and should perform in comedies more often: with a better comic foil than MacFarlane to play with, she'd make an excellent straight woman.  In fact, everyone in the cast who plays it straight is quite good.  Neeson has some of the best scenes as the imposing villain.  As Albert's wiry nemesis, Harris's big laughs rarely fall flat; the mere look of him is funnier than any of MacFarlane's labored gags.

A few moments do work.  MacFarlane has a very funny Woody-esque monologue early in the film in which he runs through a laundry list of what a horrible time it is to be living.  Bill Maher's cameo as a hacky square-dance comedian is spot-on.  Christopher Lloyd appears in a scene that will melt the heart of everyone born in the '80s.  MacFarlane's talent as a songwriter (along with composer Joel McNeely, whose score is a likable Dmitri Tiomkin soundalike) stands out with two very good songs: a fun dance number at the midpoint, and a closing-credits title song sung by Alan Jackson that has more laughs than the entire movie.

The rest of the movie drags on for two full hours.  When MacFarlane tends toward the repetitively vulgar--as in a sub-plot featuring Giovanni Ribisi and his Christian prostitute girlfriend played by Sarah Silverman--the laughs wither soon.  When he has the characters speak in a "meta" style, the movie suffers too.  The numerous references to slavery and the massacre of the Indians are properly culturally sensitive but lazily written; he'll usually just have his characters comment flippantly on what's happening.

Some bad movies are a collaborative effort.  This one is pretty much entirely MacFarlane's fault.  It's not that MacFarlane is untalented, or as hackneyed as this material represents; he's done great things and will again.  He will write and direct a great film again.  Dare I say, he could even act again; though he's got an immensely better presence as a voice actor than as a live actor, he could be shaped into a good live performer.  But he should never be allowed to direct himself in a live-action film again.  Some auteurs need complete artistic freedom, but in every scene of this film MacFarlane desperately needs someone to check on him.

* 1/2 out of ****

Is it really that bad?: Yeah, for the most part it is.

Pain level: Moderate to intense, depending on whether Neeson or Harris is on screen.