THE BREEDER

CONTAINS SPOILERS?

The sleazy Eastern European torture/slasher cheapie hits a new and unpleasant low with this thoroughly unlikeable piece of German-Swiss (according to the IMDb) grot that's been hanging about since 2009 and has only recently hit the rental lists with a wet pffft. It's not like they don't try to liven things up with the camera moves and angles, but it's plainly in the service of a story that's not worth telling told by people who aren't any good at telling it, set in Georgia and shot for about fourpence on the cheapest camcorder they could find.

A psychopath in a gas mask (who may be The Breeder of the title; his maniac soubriquet is never revealed) is abducting women and doing horrible stuff with them in the flooded basement of an abandoned mansion in a minefield because.... blah blah something about evil and sin and making the world a better place by cutting away their guilt. This is clearly a long-term plan to rid the Earth of vileness and debauchery because he's doing it one girl at a time and he's only done one so far. He kidnaps a hiker who's committed the unpardonable sin of skinny-dipping; her friend looks for her at the local village and the UN command post. But might the maniac be the one person she trusts in her quest to rescue her friend?

It's tacky, it's grubby, it's technically shoddy (the psycho's opening monologue is so distorted as to be incomprehensible, and the DVD doesn't have subtitles to help make any sense of it) and it alternates scenes of the "good" girl trying to get the UN involved and relaxing at the local village (where some of the locals clearly have something to hide), with the "trashy" girl strapped to a gurney and menaced by a Grade-A whackjob. Or endless wandering around knee-deep in the railway tunnels (why?) in the basement. There are no surprises to be had: the mystery villain is exactly who you think it is and the red herring hero is exactly who you think it is.

Why? Why make it, why release it, why watch it? To the first two questions, the answer is obviously money: it's dirt cheap with a small cast of unknowns and it'll obviously make its minimal budget back by selling the DVD rights to the first couple of territories. As for the third: well, it's got sleaze and breasts and bits of gore, but is that really a good reason to plod through such amateur night at the abattoir dross? If it had come out thirty years ago it would probably have been seized as a video nasty, but in 2013, having had full-on films like Martyrs and Inside and A Serbian Film, there seems little point in going back to such childish, lazy nonsense. Faintly loathsome.

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