The Breed

Adrian Paul, Bokeem Woodbine, Bai Ling. Motion Picture Corp of America, 2001.

Regarding the filming - would someone please take the fog machine away from this director? Seriously, about halfway through the film it ceased to be "mood-enhancing" and became merely annoying. Until the final shot when I just wanted to scream.

'Nuff said about that. Vampire film - this one: Vamps jes like us, only subjected to intense racism. Nice counterpoint with the African-American cop, being prejudiced against Vampires. That made for some good lines and really presented the case well.

Other than that, this film is the "exotic Vampire" style, a la the Anne Rice-style of Vamps. Not a problem with that. I did however, have a problem with the Vamp cop being a former Polish Jew from WW2, so we had a lot of flashbacks to the time he lost his wife/daughter at the hands of the dirty German soldiers. Which is something I despise about using WW2 as a movie/character device. It's been used so many times that it has ceased to be what it was meant to be: the prime point in a character's life that defines what that character has become, and instead of being that "defining moment" to use the WW2 German/Jew problem, it has simply become a cliché: devoid of meaning - we as the audience are supposed to feel horror/revulsion (those dirty Germans!) but simply we feel nothing. Now, I write this at the risk of uncovering all those neo-Nazi hate mongers screaming "heck yeah! Go Verble!" just like kicking over a rock and seeing ten million roaches race freely across the ground, but I'm mainly talking about the use of it as a plot device. What I'm saying is that the Holocoust was the grand tragedy, possibly THE defining moment of the character of the 20th Century, and to see it reduced to a tepid (and often poorly used) stock flashback, simply makes me sad.

Whew! What a tirade. Now you know why my mammy named me "Verble."

The other thing I wanted to comment on was that I also feel about about me writing all these blogs about movies, becuase quite frankly, when you start writing about a certain topic, you begin to see similarities between things, when, in fact, each piece should stand on its own merits. In this case: The Breed somehow reminded me so much of Alex Cox's Death and the Compass. Both in style/mood/semi-futuristic-yet-somehow-40's-noir world.

Odd. (BTW - Death and the Compass was great! Albeit in a "What the . . . ?" way)

But - all in all, not a bad movie. I'd say watch it, but don't expect award-winning theatre.

VG