![]() “We kind of made it in the image of Neil Breen. “We quickly decided that we needed to make something that could be plopped down into a bad-movie marathon and no one would be the wiser,” Keene explains. Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance Cinema Epochįor Keene and Doyle, the goal with Fatal Future was not to parody Neil Breen, per se, but to generate their own authentic Neil Breen-style experience. Prior and Breen himself, have employed crowdfunding to get fans involved in their work, with varying degrees of success. Other bad-movie icons, including Birdemic’s James Nguyen, Deadly Prey’s David A. That movie was partially financed via crowdfunding campaigns promoted by online fan groups. Gregory Hatanaka, a filmmaker and distributor who helped popularize the 1991 cult movie Samurai Cop, took it upon himself to create a sequel to his favorite bad movie, co-writing and directing 2015’s Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance and recruiting many of the film’s original actors to star in it. In The Disaster Artist, Franco not only tells the story of how The Room was made (casting himself as Wiseau), but also meticulously recreates full scenes from the film, using the credits to prove his accuracy with side-by-side comparison reels. Increasingly, fans of these delusions seek to participate in them in some way. ![]() Breen and Wiseau are both part of what Keene calls a “genre of delusion,” bad movies made by people who have complete, unshakable confidence in their terrible ideas. In that way, Breen has a lot in common with the most famous bad-movie auteur of the last 20 years, The Room writer-director-star Tommy Wiseau, who hit the mainstream thanks to James Franco’s 2017 film The Disaster Artist, about the making of The Room. That sense of purpose and purity of vision is what draws fans to Breen’s work, even more than the questionable but undeniable entertainment value of punching down. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it doesn’t have to, as long as it makes sense to him.” “When Neil Breen has a vision, he fucking goes for it,” Keene says. From a technical standpoint, Breen’s films are objectively scrappy, full of poorly placed stock footage, amateurish green-screen effects, stilted acting, confusing camera angles and awkward edits. Breen writes, directs and stars in all of his feature films (his fifth, Twisted Pair, is currently making the rounds at theaters worldwide), usually playing some sort of hyper-intelligent, hyper-competent messiah figure who is the only hope to save the world from government and corporate tyranny. ![]() Anyone familiar with Breen’s work will find Fatal Future instantly recognizable.īreen, also a Las Vegas-based filmmaker, has been making inexplicable low-budget films since his 2005 debut Double Down, and over the last decade he’s become one of the main “stars” of the underground world of bad-movie fandom. ![]() The spoof is becoming part of the self-sustaining ecosystem of bad movies, which in recent years have turned into a viable genre of their own. And now, a little over a year later, Keene and Doyle’s film Fatal Future - which they wrote and directed together under the pseudonym Mitch Kean, and is now streamable on Amazon Video - is quietly on its way to amassing a cult following of its own. “There was so much about Neil Breen and his style that took us and really was so much more than we had been used to with bad films.”Īlmost immediately after finishing Fateful Findings, Keene and Doyle formulated a plan: Watch every Neil Breen movie in existence, then go make one of their own. “I don’t even know how we stumbled upon this specifically, because I don’t even know what I searched for,” Keene says. The Las Vegas-based filmmaker considers himself something of a bad-movie expert, but when he and his friend and fellow filmmaker Sean Doyle came across Breen’s 2013 film Fateful Findings, they were astounded. Michael Keene had no idea what he was getting into when he first saw a Neil Breen movie.
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