Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain
Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain
R | 01 March 2003 (USA)
Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain Trailers

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...

Reviews
Neive Bellamy

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

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Juana

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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Kayden

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

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Allissa

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

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TdSmth5

In the intro, a couple frolicking in a tent at nights hears a noise. So they do what movie characters always do, stop doing what they're doing and go outside and find out what the noise is. When the guy gets back the girl is gone. Later he finds her, or rather half of her. He then wakes up in a cave, shackled and bound next to knives and body parts. He frees himself but something catches him again.We then meet a bunch of college kids on a class trip in Ireland. The teacher and her boyfriend are also there. When they get to a house they are warned repeatedly by the strange locals to not wander in the woods but stay on the path. These kids aren't particularly likable, there's the horror movie buff who bullies the nice girl constantly, a couple who can't keep their hands off each other, and some other girl. Of course they do wander off course and find some ruins where the creature lives. Meanwhile the creature starts killing them one buy one in some very gory ways, especially if you see the extended scenes in the bonus features.The innocent girl also ends up in the ruin/cave and finds out what the creature/creatures are all about.You can definitely tell that something went very wrong in the production of Evil Breed. Acting by the kids is atrocious. The movie is rather short and the filmmakers had a hard time telling the story right, that is if the script was any good to begin with. In the comments on IMDb, the director apologizes for the resulting mess saying that he didn't have a whole lot of control over the project. Despite the problems, the resulting product is somewhat likable. There's plenty of very good gore, some nudity, and you do get a sense of what this movie could have been had things gone well.

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BA_Harrison

A bunch of American students and their tutor decide to visit the ugliest part of Ireland in order to study ancient religious practices. Despite being repeatedly warned about the dangers of straying off the beaten path (by the local creepy Irish guy, natch), they do just that, and wind up with their insides on the outside courtesy of a family of inbred cannibals (the descendants of the infamous Sawney Bean clan, who according to the film's silly plot, upped sticks from Scotland and settled on the Emerald Isle).If you think that porn stars plus low budget horror automatically equals tons of nudity and terrible acting, then think again: Evil Breed is bristling with adult stars, but in fact, there's not nearly as much nudity as one might expect given the 'talent' involved, and the acting, although far from Oscar worthy, ain't all that bad (with the exception of Ginger Lynn Allen, who we know can do marvellous 'French', but whose Irish is lousy).Evil Breed opens in superb style with the brutal slaughter of a couple of amorous campers: after some brief under-canvas sex, the silicone enhanced hottie is dragged from the tent and torn in half; the guy has his arms and legs cut off and is roasted on a spit. It's a very gory start, and bodes well for the rest of the film.Unfortunately, after this promising beginning, things start to go seriously downhill: we are introduced to the main characters, an annoying bunch of twenty-somethings just begging to become cannibal chow, and are subjected to a fair amount of time wasting in the form of some terrible false scares, a lot of blarney about murderous druids from local Irish weirdo Gary (Simon Peacock), and worst of all, some sub-Scream, post-modernistic conversation about the conventions of horror films (how clever!).Then, just as it looks as though the film is never going to get any better, director Christian Viel decides to get serious: a guy gets a knife rammed through his head and there's a gratuitous sex-in-the-shower scene featuring lovely blonde Gillian Leigh (NOT a porn star, but I'm sure there's a career there waiting if she wants it). After that, things improve rapidly as the cannibals kick into top flesh-eating gear, and the film is transformed into a veritable bloodbath: Gary has a machete rammed up his ass (about time!), and is strangled with his intestines; Ginger Lynn kick-boxes a mutant; Jenna Jameson is torn open, eviscerated and has her silicone breast implant gnawed on by confused cannibal; a guy gets decapitated by cheese wire; and Taylor Hayes is seen bloody, bruised and naked with a dead foetus between her legs (apparantly, she's been captured and used as breeding stock).All of this is so outrageously gory that it makes sitting through the less interesting stuff worthwhile, and earns Evil Breed a final rating of 7/10.NB. A very troubled production and studio meddling resulted in Christian Viel eventually abandoning the project. Re-shoots were done and the gore was heavily trimmed for a US release. The good news is that although the film doesn't flow as well as it might have, and is cursed with a terrible ending, the UK DVD (the version I watched) seems to have been left relatively intact as far as the splatter is concerned (only 13s were cut from the film in total).

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universal_monster

Two teachers (Bobbie Phillips and Howard Rosenstein) chaperon a school trip to Ireland so five students can study the history of Druids or some such nonsense. A forest-dwelling mutant shows up to kill them all off. The director of this cheap-looking and disposable hunk-o-junk claims the film was ruined by studio tampering, unwanted script rewrites and such, so I'm tempted to cut him a little slack because these things are known to happen. As the film now stands, it's close to being unwatchable.Truly terrible in every regard; barely (just barely) kept afloat by ample doses of gore and T&A. The acting is some of the worst I've ever seen. Literally everyone in the cast is embarrassing. I don't think that has anything to do with tampering, just a combination of amateur actors, a director that doesn't know how to work with them and awkward dialogue that's impossible to say without coming off like a total tool. Richard Grieco, who looks like he's had either one face-lift too many or too much botox pumped into his face and is starting to look rather inhuman these days, is falsely advertised as being one of the leads when his part is minuscule. The other names in the cast you'll probably only be familiar with if you're an avid porn viewer. Jenna Jameson pops up for a couple of minutes to say a few lines and die. Ginger Lynn has more screen time and delivers one of the worst Irish accents known to man. Not that the guy cast alongside her, whose overacting is unintentionally hilarious, is any better. There are a few other adult actresses on the payroll but their screen time is even smaller than Jennas.Even worse than the acting is the writing. The storyline is muddled as hell and incomprehensible, the editing is choppy, characters disappear right and left for no reason whatsoever and it is overloaded with annoying, childish and lame post-SCREAM hipster dialogue about how big breasted women always die in horror films and such. Even the friggin theme song at the beginning is screwed up! The vocalist actually MISPRONOUNCES the word "Samhain;" pronouncing it exactly how it's spelling instead of "Sow-en!" For the love of God, do some research people! Some of the gore effects are decent, but you have to be very forgiving of complete technical ineptitude to tolerate this mess.

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Matt_Layden

Tourists head to Ireland for a school trip to learn about Druids. What they encounter is a horrific tale of cannibalistic killers.If I had to sum up Evil Breed, it would be a low grade gore fest. The film mixes Dead Alive, Evil Dead, Wrong Turn all in one. It's just too bad that the film has so many inconsistencies to keep track of that it loses any "fun" one would have watching it. The film has lots of random "horror" nudity...although the film also stars four porn stars, yup four, so there could have been plenty more. Breed also showcases a good amount of gore. Evil Breed has a horrible start, with laughable dialogue and horrible acting. That's a given in a straight to video horror film, but this takes the cake. I can't really figure out who the main character is, since the one female who "lives" at the end is not really in the movie all that much. Speaking of the ending, that has to be one of the most random and bogus ending in the history of film. It has no purpose with the rest of the film and totally changes one's view of the film.You have to see this film to believe it, since there are some pretty great death scenes. There are two death scenes that come into my mind, one in which the inbred killer rips the intestines out of a naked woman through her chest....yea her chest, don't ask me. The other id when the guy gets his intestines, yet again, ripped out through his asshole. Does that kill the guy? No, the killer continues to strangle the guy with his own intestines. These scenes remind me so much of Dead-Alive, with the right amount of humour in each. I also got the sense of Evil Dead, with the pointless mentions of horror films and Sam Raimi. Along with Halloween, when the female character is in a closet screaming for her life with the killer trying desperately;y to get in.Although, the gore and nudity are not enough for the poor audio and visual quality of the film. When the teacher wakes up from her bed and walks down the stairs, her footsteps are so loud and hard that it seems like she was wearing boots. Distracting indeed. As well as the continuity in the film, with only one inbred killer? As well as which character dies at which moment. I couldn't tell if the breast implant chick was Jenny or Gary's sister/cousin...I can't remember. As well as the random naked chick with a dead baby hanging out of her body, still attached with the umbilical cord.The horrible editing is distracting as well, the opening credits are too fast and disorienting. It did have a bad start and got better, but the ending just brings the film back down to a horrible level. If maybe there were better production values and more faith put into this film, then it wouldn't have been horribly butchered to death. Stay away from this film, unless you are happy with the below budget horrible bad film with decent gore.

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