Schlock Corridor: Day Three

 

SCHLOCK CORRIDOR: Breeders (Deadly Instincts)

1997's Breeders (re-titled Deadly Instincts on Netflix) is a movie about a monster from space that wants to knock up a whole bunch of co-eds. That sounds a lot more exciting than it is, I assure you. Reading the short synopsis, I was half-expecting and half-hoping for a riff on 1980's Humanoids From The Deep, that wonderfully bizarre Roger Corman production about genetically engineered fish monsters that crash a local fishing village festival, looking for nubile young women to have their way with. Unfortunately, Breeders never approaches the heights of madness captured on celluloid in Humanoids From The Deep. That doesn't mean it's a terrible movie, though. Well... I suppose it really is a terrible movie when you break it down, but it's at least an entertaining one for the most part.

Our story begins as a meteor slams into a college campus, causing quite a commotion among the students and faculty. But was it really a meteor? Of course it wasn't really a meteor! It was an alien spaceship, and a very horny, very toothy monster is loose on campus, searching for some warm bodies to hide his eggs. His unwilling companion is a scarred young woman identified in the end credits only as "Space Girl", who was abducted by the aliens years earlier, subjected to numerous experiments in order to act as his egg-carrying slave.

I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I believe her body carries the alien's eggs but doesn't incubate them, acting more like a waiting room for the embryos until the alien finds a suitable host. This doesn't make a lot of sense, nor does it make sense that when a woman is implanted with an embryo, she grows fangs and turns into a mindless, ravenous monster that throws herself into dangerous situations with seemingly no self-preservation instinct. Not a very good way to ensure the survival of your species, Mr. Alien Monster, but who am I to tell you how to do your business?

One of the professors, a generically handsome dude named Ashley, is having an affair with one his students, a young lady who looks suspiciously like Jaime Pressly, and nobody seems to care. Now I never went to college (big surprise), but I guess I just naturally assumed that a teacher having an affair with a student was a big deal. Maybe it's just par for the course when one matriculates, but it stills seems like a really bad idea to me.

Anyhoo, the monster kind of lurks in the shadows for a while, one of the students disappears, and some police detective desperately trying (and failing) to channel the world-weary sleaziness of  Armand Assante shows up to immediately accuse Ashley of being a psychopathic mass murderer, because the movie needs this sub-plot to pad the running time to ninety minutes.

About thirty-odd minutes of nothing happens, then a squad of truly inept police officers enters the sewers to search for the missing girl's body, and they run afoul of the alien and get torn apart. The squad leader barely survives, meeting the Space Girl, who promises to lead him to safety before immediately excusing herself to let the poor bastard get his at the taloned hands of this not-quite-Pumpkinhead-looking creature. I guess she had better things to do. Then the alien monster uses his unexplained psychic powers to summon a dozen or so co-eds underground to carry his slimy alien eggs in their unsuspecting wombs. This guy is so badass, he's got the trim coming to him en masse! What is your secret, Mr. Alien Monster?

Ashley teams up with his girlfriend and Space Girl to journey into the sewers and teach this extraterrestrial menace that Earth Dudes don't like to share their Earth Broads with Space Dudes. They unceremoniously murder a whole lot of mind-controlled, alien baby-carrying young women without batting an eyelash as they make their way to the star pimp, then the clueless detective shows up just in time to help our protagonists slay the beast by dropping him down a convenient chute, into a well filled with flaming water... then everything blows up. I don't know why everything blows up, but it just does. Our heroes run from a series of poorly composited explosions, then look up to see a series of meteors streaking across the sky, signaling the beginning of a full-fledged space-rapist invasion.

And that's it. That's Breeders, or Deadly Instincts, if you prefer. Honestly, I liked the movie. It's not any good, but it's charmingly terrible. The cluelessly lame performances, the hokey incidental music, and the bulky, rubbery monster all serve to create something memorable, never slipping too far into banality to cause my attention to wander. It had the potential to be much better, and I'll certainly never watch it again, but at least I didn't feel like I wasted my time when it was over. It's a cheesy, low budget creature feature, and that's all it ever aspired to be. The occasional nudity doesn't hurt, either.

So good job, Breeders. You don't suck.

TOMORROW: The Dead Undead