[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]
Guys, this one is very important. For long we have wandered through the vast wasteland of bad movies in hopes of a new savior who can help elevate the art and provide us with hours of delicious schedefreude. Tommy Wiseau is busy trying to fund a pointless television show that is almost as painful as it is funny, Ed Wood is dead, and James Nguyen . . . apparently made a "Birdemic" sequel but no one seems to be talking about it so, whatever. Maybe another week. This week we are talking about the new name in bad movies: Neil Breen, a man who sort of looks like a Hobbit crossed with a melting Alan Rickman mask who you definitely don't want to introduce to your kids. Not only did Neil Breen direct, produce, write, edit, and star in "Fateful Findings"; he also did the casting, production design, sound editing, and makeup. It is a doozy.
In a flashback, a girl and a boy find a mushroom in the woods that transforms into a fancy box with a black rock inside that they take with them. The girl moves away and the boy is presently an author, struggling to write his second book while dealing with depression (I think?) and his Polish wife's pill-popping addiction. Neil Breen, the man, gets hit by a car but survives because of the black rock that seems to have magic powers that call on a crappy wind effect. Out of nowhere at home with his wife he says that he hasn't been researching his novel but has been "hacking into national and international databases" on his six computers that he often abuses. He also dreams a lot about being in a room covered in black garbage bags and about a giant mystical book. Meanwhile, Breen's alcoholic best friend is sorta accidentally killed by his wife who frames it as a suicide. That subplot is dropped. The best friend's underage daughter tries to seduce Breen for no discernible reason. That subplot is dropped. Breen meets the girl from his past and they have an affair right before his wife ODs. This means relatively little. You start to wonder how so many things can be happening when there isn't really a plot. Breen has a green-screen press conference where he talks about his hacking discoveries that are apparently in the rock (the rock was a thumb drive?) and a bunch of CEOs kill themselves. You wonder how if that was the whole point, why did the movie talk so little about it? You want to watch more Neil Breen movies.
While the plot may not show it, this movie is a masterpiece of terrible movies. About halfway through the film, I noticed that if you start imagining that you are actually watching a David Lynch movie in the vein of "Rabbits" or "Inland Empire", the movie actually gets better until something happens to remind you that this man is definitely not David Lynch. You get the impression that Neil Breen read a book on acting and one on directing and managed to walk away with concepts but not understanding and application. For example, Breen sees two therapists in the film: one who is a pill pusher who doesn't do much and who always sits at the other end of a seriously long table and the other who is very in tune with him whose office is essentially a broom closet. Breen clearly understood that one can show emotional distance in a film with physical distance and emotional closeness with physical closeness but never actually considered how bonkers this would actually look on screen if done wrong. He also is aware that when acting you can sometimes show anger not just with a raised voice but also by throwing things. So he does this no less than four times in the movie, often over very little. This is what makes his level of incompetency so glorious to watch. Another unique trait is that not only do certain scenes repeat but there is the definite sense that he shot the same scenes multiple times and put every take into the movie regardless of coherency.The regular bad movie issues are all present too: dialogue that doesn't sound human, monotone acting, incomprehensible plot (Sarah was practically crying by the end of it), one set used over and over, blatant disregard for basic medical science, everyone made up to look like wax figures, excessive shots of people's feet, really slow moving scenes for no reason, bad special effects, you name it.
I do want to specifically give a shout out to the actress who played the stepdaughter though. She was fantastic. She seemed to be high throughout the entire movie (and I mean the actress seemed high, not the character) and she had one of the most beautiful moments of the film. After her "seduction" of Breen, he sits her down to have a talk about how she can't do this and then she looks directly into the camera like she's on "The Office" as if to say to the audience, "Can you believe this shit?" Then she seems to forget her line and just nods at him for an awkward few seconds. I have never felt more connected to an actor.
You can be damn sure there will be more Neil Breen films coming up.
The credits listed a lot of companies like "NNN Productions" or "Eats N Eats Food Services" and then they ended with this message. How cute. He tried to be humble.
Quotes:
[a sample of the kind of dialogue this movie has]
"I want you to try this new wine."
"I would love to try your new wine."
[while awkwardly holding his friend's dead body; with monotone exasperation]
"I can't believe you committed suicide. I can't believe you committed suicide. How could you have committed suicide? How? I can't help you out of this one, Jim."
Spoon Rating: 9.
Grandma's Rating: "It was pretty good."
