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Evil Breed: The Legend Of Samhain (2003)

DVD Cover (Lions Gate)
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Overall Rating 32%
Overall Rating
Ranked #7,866
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Two American tourists on a romantic camping trip are brutally murdered. A few days later, during the ancient festival of Samhain, a group of American university students moves into a beautiful cottage, surrounded by a lush forest and a majestic lake. They are here to learn about the rituals of the ancient Druids and other Celtic legends. But in the remains of an abandoned copper mine, lives the ancestors of an incestuous clan of cannibals. Stalked by a hulking, disfigured mutant, the students and their chaperone are in for the most harrowing time of their young lives. And keeping their heads on their necks will become their main concern... --IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: January 21, 2006
The movie begins with Amy (porn star Chasey Lain) and her boyfriend Mark (Richard Grieco) out in these deserted Ireland woods making a porn movie of their own, minus the camera if you catch my drift. Their fun is quickly interrupted, however, when Amy hears somebody walking around outside of their tent and sends Mark out to investigate. Being the good man that he is, he follows her orders and finds nothing. Upon returning to the tent, he finds that she has disappeared, but he does hear something off in the woods a bit. He sets out to find out where these noises are coming from, and eventually finds Amy laying on the ground and gasping for air. He reaches his hand out to help her up, pulls her up, and... finds out that she has been cut in half at the waist and is now leaking entrails thanks to his lifting. A barely-humanoid figure then appears and knocks him out, and he awakens inside of an underground cave system with some quite hungry and very inbred people...

Meanwhile, college teacher Karen Douglas (Bobbie Phillips) and her boyfriend Paul (Howard Rosenstein) are taking a group of students on a tour of Dublin in order to study ancient Druid rituals and the celebration of Samhain; rounding out the students side of things are Shae (Brandi-Ann Milbradt), Jim (Neil Napier), Tara (Heidi Hawkins), Steve (Phil Price) and Barbara (Gillian Leigh). The teacher has plenty of historical knowledge to drop on these students, the teens have wild nights of partying in mind, and everything seems to be going good... until the caretaker (Simon Peacock) shows up and warns them about the American tourists who have been killed around these parts. They brush him off as nothing more than a local nut-job, but how true his warnings turn out to be...

This movie has been in and out of horror news reports since 2002, and needless to say, it's a title that I've been wanting to see. The original concept had all of the makings to go down as a classic; comedic elements in line with something one would find in Dead Alive, hardcore sex scenes with real-life porn stars (Jenna Jameson, Ginger Lynn Allen, and Taylor Hayes in addition to the aforementioned Chasey Lain), and an insanely high dosage of some of the most brutal gore scenes that you'll find. Yes, the movie sounded like it had everything going for it, but things went sour between director Christian Viel and the various studios and investors. You see, comedy in horror doesn't sell tickets. Gore? Who wants that... certainly not the horror fans. And the nudity? Pffft... throw that one right out the window. Somebody else finished the movie and changed a shockingly large number of things after Viel walked away from it, the entire tone of the movie was changed from a gorefest with comedic elements to a run-of-the-mill slasher, and all of the good stuff was left on the cutting-room floor. You know, on a personal note, it's a sad day when The Dukes Of Hazzard can get an unrated release, but a horror film that has been eagerly anticipated by scores of people can barely get an edited version released.

With all of that in mind, remember that I am critiquing an edited version of this man's work. Based on the things I've read and the whopping two deleted scenes found on the DVD, I'm nearly positive that Viel's version of the film would have scored in the high "Perfect" range from yours truly. However, that's not the film that you're going to find outside of the bootleg market, and that's not the film that I am reviewing tonight.

First of all, the storyline found here had potential; how can you go wrong with a group of teens in the middle of nowhere with cannibals picking them off in extremely gruesome ways? Sure, it's not an award-winning breath of fresh air into the horror genre, but that's not the reason we view these types of movies. I'm fine with that, and I realize that something needs to be thrown down to string the gore and nudity along from scene to scene. The problem is that the stars of the movies are outshined by the porn actresses in the acting department, and then it boils down to one person versus one cannibal in an underground game of cat-and-mouse. Once again, I wasn't expecting a lot from the movie in this regard, but I was expecting something that would make the seventy minutes of film worth my time. As Viel has went on record to explain, his vision of a comedic horror was replaced with a sanitized, MTVized slasher flick full of Scream references. Would his idea have worked out? I think so... but as he also went on record to say, what he shot for the film was not made to be edited into this type of film, and it certainly shows.

The gore effects are virtually non-existent in this cut of the movie. The opening scene that I described in my synopsis up at the beginning of this review is the best one of all, but even that is tame when compared to other gems from the genre. Two scenes are restored as deleted scenes, and these are the most tell-tale signs of how much the film was edited down for this release. In the feature-length film, Jenna Jameson is killed by a cannibal who cuts her chest open and... well, that's about all you see in this twenty-second scene. In the deleted scene, Jenna Jameson is killed by a cannibal who cuts her chest open, pulls out one of her implants and, thinking it's a bodily organ, attempts to eat it. After realizing his mistake, he throws it aside and pulls out the rest of her entrails in what turns out to be a three minute scene that pulls a good laugh from the audience and is also something that gorehounds will eat up with savage glee. Two minutes and forty seconds was cut out here, and this was just one part of one scene. Needless to say, the gore could have been the big selling point of this movie, but the vast majority of it wound up on the cutting-room floor.

Perhaps one day a director's cut of this film will make its way into the mainstream. I'd certainly plunk down my twenty dollars for that release, but as it stands, I couldn't recommend this movie to anyone. Until that director's cut of the film hits stores (although I doubt it ever will), avoid this one. 4/10.
Chad #1: Chad - added January 21, 2006 at 7:26am
Oh yes... I forgot to mention. Jenna Jameson is the cover-girl for this DVD, and she's credited as being one of the stars of the film. In actuality, she winds up with about three minutes of screen-time. Take that as you will.
Crispy #2: Crispy - added February 16, 2006 at 10:42am
Not surprising, movie apparantly sucked so they're trying to cash in on her fame. While I do enjoy a little porn now and then, I'm not really a connaseuer with a dvd shelf full and even I've heard of Jenna.
Joey #3: Joey - added November 3, 2007 at 10:07pm
Can anyone tell me what the wicked song in the credits is???
danimigra #4: danimigra - added March 22, 2008 at 3:32pm
i did not like at all ths film... not even jenna could do something for the film..jaja
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