Neil Breen: The Unintentional Maestro of Cinematic Catastrophe
In the eclectic and haphazard world of so-bad-it’s-good cinema, no auteur stands as tall as Neil Breen: real-estate agent, architect, filmmaker. For better or worse, Breen has established a name for himself as a low-budget Lynch, starring in and directing six “professional, feature-length, independent films” over the course of 19 years each more unintelligible than the last. Bizarrely shot, haphazardly edited, poorly acted, it might seem like Neil Breen only exists as a misguided laughing stock to applaud for his astounding ability to fail at every turn. But is there more to it? Is there any artistic merit or insight to gain from the ravings of a lunatic?
Double Down came onto the scene in 2005 as Neil Breen’s first foray into the world of low-budget independent cinema. Following a genius part-time hobo, part-time hacker whose fiance is murdered in an assassination plot gone wrong, Neil Breen’s character must work with the government who took everything from him to stop a terrorist attack on Las Vegas. He’s also omnicompetent, owns twenty different laptops for hacking, can hack anything, and poisoned the Hoover Dam’s water supply, etc, etc. It’s like if David Lynch cast himself as Paul Atreides. From the onset, Breen establishes himself as a tour-de-force with seemingly everything to say and nothing to say. Rarely has a film captured an artist’s psyche so vividly, establishing the themes with which he works with for the rest of time. Government. Shadow entities. Hacking. A messianic god complex.
Bruce Lee once said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” If that’s true, Neil Breen is the most dangerous man on the planet.
I Am Here…Now: An alien being from another universe lands on Earth and takes it upon itself to eliminate the politicians, lawyers, criminals, corporate leaders, and others who disrespect the planet. Pass Thru: An artificial intelligence from far into the future arrives to immediately cleanse the human species of millions of humans who are harmful to other humans. I’ve only described half of Breen’s filmography , yet the pattern is apparent. Breen has made a career out of making the same movie SIX times so far. A throughline exists throughout his work, one which paints a picture of an individual obsessed with messianic figures; an individual who understands the world as inherently untenable and which requires a Biblical cleansing. It’s an idea that Breen can’t seem to get out of his head, and he needs everybody to know about it.
Yet for all these musings on the nature of corruption in the foundations of our society, Neil Breen miraculously accomplishes saying nothing. Breen’s worldview is built on the idea of cartoonishly evil businessmen standing next to each other in billion-dollar homes. They say things like: “medical research could have cured cancer and other diseases seventy-five years ago, but we won't let that happen. We'd lose too much money.” To which Neil Breen brilliantly asks “isn’t that corrupt?”. His solutions to this corruption are biblical exterminations, immigrants going back to their home countries to improve it themselves, and teaching mental asylum patients kung fu to fight back against Big Pharma. If anything can be gleaned from these movies sociopolitically, it’s nothing that won’t get you on a government watch list.
So is there nothing here to see? Is he in on the joke and stealing money from us rubes while everyone laughs at him?
If this was a con job, Neil Breen wouldn’t be selling his movies through a PayPal link on different websites for each movie, on burned CDs in plastic cases that he mails out individually without shipping information because it’s too expensive – I would know because I’m the sucker who bought Cade: the tortured crossing for $33.99. He wouldn’t ban midnight screenings of his movies in theatres and refuse to stream them digitally. No, Neil Breen sees himself as completely legitimate. When he sells a $150 filmmaking course it’s not a scam. It’s an earnest belief that he has something valuable to teach, and that’s the beauty of it.
Despite failure after failure, Neil Breen has no self awareness, or maybe he simply doesn’t care about the internet’s ironic worship. The importance of Breen’s corpus isn’t any merit from their narratives or artistry, but their mere existence. Even as his budgets degrade, as he goes from shooting on film in the Nevada deserts in Double Down to filming exclusively on green screens in Cade: the tortured crossing, Breen persists. He will continue to make the same movie over and over again, writing heavy-handed paranoid social parables, until the day he drops; whether that be from natural causes or the shadow cabals silencing him for speaking out. Neil Breen’s movies matter because they’re an ode to the delusional artist, those who continue despite it all, the ones who show us that maybe we should all be a bit more deluded. There’s at least someone who’ll get a kick out of it.