Cade: The Tortured Crossing and all the images you see in this review are owned by Neil Breen Films
Directed by Neil Breen
Neil Breen has been a curious figure in the recent cinematic landscape as critics and audiences alike are always on the lookout for the coveted So Bad Its Good movies and seem to have found a cash cow in the form of Breen’s bizarre and uncomfortably amateurish productions. His latest feature, a sequel to his quasi-superhero flick Twisted Pair, has certainly garnered some buzz off of his reputation and the silly trailer he released, but the thing about Breen that makes him endearing is his clear earnestness and how fame hasn’t stifled his creative drive. He could be out there on the Tommy Wiseau circuit and embrace the clownish reputation of his work, but he comes off as a sincere, if utterly incompetent and a little regressive, auteur who wants his movies to have genuine acclaim for their deep ideas and disturbing revelations. Well, I plan to give him what he wants and to take this movie seriously. No cheap shots, no, tired jokes, and no feigned bafflement at what we’re seeing. We’re here to find out if Neil Breen has improved as a filmmaker and if his latest project is worth anyone’s time who isn’t in on the joke. Will this be one step closer to Neil making his Oscar-worthy magnum opus, or has the king of bad movies somehow regressed further into incompetence? Let’s find out!!
After the events of Twisted Pair where Cade Altair (Neil Breen) crushed the Cuzzx empire using his AI science-magic superpowers, he’s gone into philanthropy and has donated lots of money to a nearby mental asylum. All is not as it seems, however, as the head doctor (Amy Solomon) is in cahoots with an evil corporation to perform horrible experiments and extract precious fluids from their patients. A good doctor (Nicole Butler) is trying her best to make the situation better, but Cade is unimpressed when he realizes the terrors going on at this asylum and vows to help its patients become warriors of humanity and justice. Seems straightforward enough, but what Cade doesn’t know is that his long-lost brother Cale (Neil Breen) has been hired by the corporation to kidnap patients and is trying to use the extracted fluids to make himself as powerful as his brother Cade once again. Will Cade be able to save these patients from the dastardly corporation and bring justice to the world? What does Cale have planned for Cade if he was to find out about his misdeeds, and is there any hope for him to turn his life around? Is it just me, or does it seem that Neil Breen watched The New Mutants during the Pandemic and literally nothing else?
The movie is ultimately a mixed bag with some definite improvements in certain areas as he seems to have started listening to his critics, but I worry that he’s developing some bad habits due to his reputation as a Bad Filmmaker. Breen is at his most compelling when he’s absolutely sincere and seemingly stuck inside his own head, and while there is plenty of that to be found in here, he also seems to be taking cues from his anti-fanbase and is tailoring certain scenes to that crowd and is trying to preserve the low-rent charm of his earlier works. Much like a great orchestra trying to sound like a school band, the obvious sour notes are distracting which mostly come across in the editing. He allows takes to go on too long and adds freeze frames to the end of scenes, but he doesn’t do it consistently and his actors are just not as amateurish as they’ve been in the past. Even if it’s still entirely sincere, it doesn’t come off as such and nothing sucks the air out of a good-bad movie more than intentionally trying to make one; especially when he has clearly grown as a filmmaker. The plot is not incomprehensible with a much more focused antagonist and actual characters to populate the cast instead of just cardboard cutouts for Breen to bounce off of. In fact, Cade is not nearly in this as much as you’d expect which perhaps is a positive step for Breen as he’s focusing on characters other than himself, though none of this can solve the underlying issue of his poor writing and his cast can only do so much to elevate what they are given. Breen has certainly cut back on his monologues and disparate plot threads but he replaces them with a mercilessly repetitive second act that is overly padded with the same scenes of patients being captured, tortured, and murdered, playing out over and over again for no discernable reason. They don’t advance the plot forward and they aren’t interesting enough spectacles in their own right which grinds the pacing to a crawl with only the occasional Cale scene to spice things up. Breen actually gets a lot out of Cale in this who seems to be going through a genuine struggle while still having a sense of agency, and it’s a shame that the movie doesn’t focus on him more or give him any meaningful interactions with the rest of the cast until the very end of the movie.
As long as we’re back on the list of improvements, he’s curbed back considerably on the romance which has always been an uncomfortable insight into his relationship with women. He still has a love interest, but their interactions are very sparse and the character is one of the most developed in the film; arguably becoming more of a protagonist in this movie than Cade or Cale. The rest of the cast is definitely game for whatever is asked of them and seems to have actual screen presence instead of just looking like lost amateurs; even when the movie gets to the trademark Breen strangeness. The aesthetic is a good place to start as the entire film is done via green screen against stock photos which means the actors had to really put their imaginations to work in figuring out how to play each screen, and while I can’t say it’s a better option than using actual sets, his compositing is better and there’s certainly an uncanniness to it that I found compelling. It also helps with the action scenes which again have this uncanny bizarreness to it as everyone is miming attacks against one another, and the finale does feel like a genuine escalation with a modest enough payoff to everything we’ve seen up to this point.
To me, Breen is coming off like a filmmaker who believes he caught lightning in a bottle and is trying to recreate that with his more recent films. Personally, I don’t think that’s the case and I’d give Breen more credit than that as there’s a genuinely dark imagination on display in all of his movies. It’s not always wholesome or even that thought-provoking, but they’ve definitely given us an interesting insight into one man’s obsessions. What came off as effortless weirdness in his previous films, however, feels a little more like an act here, so I wouldn’t say this is his best movie, but having less of Breen’s scarier quirks definitely makes it a more watchable movie, and one that I can actually talk about on its own merits instead of dissect for its filmmaker’s foibles. I still kind of root for the guy, or at least the version of himself that he presents in his movies, and would be happy if he one day did make a genuinely great film. You can’t say that he doesn’t have a passion for what he does, and his steady steps closer to competence are encouraging to see. My rating is very subjective here as Breen’s work is on a level all its own, but I still had a decent enough time with it and for anyone in on the joke, it’s certainly worth checking out. For everyone else, you’re probably better off waiting for Red Letter Media to get around to it.
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