Breeders (Tim Kincaid, 1986)

Breeders is a reasonably entertaining piece of sexploitation alien invasion schlock with lots of intentional and unintentional laughs and a reasonable running time that doesn't get bogged down with too much exposition, side plots, or characters wandering around aimlessly in corridors and catacombs. (You might think that's a weirdly specific point, but so many cheapo genre films pad their running times with aimless corridor and/or catacomb wandering. See also, wandering in the woods.) Alien rape is a major plot point, which could have led to much grim, sleazy, unpleasantness that makes audiences with reasonable moral compasses feel dirty, but almost all of this business takes place off-screen. Director Tim Kincaid understands that most of us would rather see flesh-ripping, slime bathing, nude aerobics, and alien mutation than graphic sexual assault, and I thank him for his understanding.

The film begins with two sci-fi premises -- (1) an alien spore has drifted from space to earth and uses human host bodies to impregnate earth women against their will (well, not quite impregnate; it's weirdly complicated) and (2) a large percentage of attractive women in their twenties and thirties who live and/or work near the Empire State Building are virgins. The alien needs virgins and has very little trouble finding them in '80s midtown Manhattan. Seems like the alien would have had better luck in a fundamentalist Christian-dominated small town, but hey, stereotypes are sometimes wrong. Still, it seems unlikely that the photographer, the stylist, and the model at a single fashion shoot are all virgins, especially since the model snorts coke and exercises naked while the rest of the crew goes to lunch. This is the only thing I find implausible. The alien spore business, the goo bath, and the flesh ripping are all pure science.

The rape victims all end up at a hospital under the care of Dr. Gamble Pace (Teresa Farley) with oddly similar symptoms. Each woman has an unidentifiable black substance on her, has some kind of minor genetic change, experiences amnesia after identifying her attacker, and falls into a catatonic state shortly thereafter. Also, each woman remembers a different assailant (which we understand, having seen the alien, who resembles a large fly wearing K-Mart-purchased winter wear, inhabit different humans). Dr. Pace is committed to solving these bizarre crimes, and so is the detective assigned to the case, Dale Andriotti (Lance Lewman), who takes it personally since his older sister is a rape survivor. The doctor and the detective bond over the case, which catches a break when another doctor at the hospital, Ira Markum (Ed French), recognizes microscopic slides of a substance found on the women as a particular kind of red brick dust found in a particular stretch of disused underground rail line beneath the Empire State Building that has been out of use for nearly a century.

This info comes in especially handy when the women burst out of their catatonia and take nude walks to the abandoned rail line, where the alien has prepared a strange kind of milk/semen/cake frosting slime bath that will somehow assist the women in giving birth to aliens or transforming into aliens (who the hell knows?). Whatever the case, they have to writhe around nude in the stuff for a lengthy period of time. (Some of the actresses are way more committed to the writhing than others.) Pace and Andriotti make their way to the weird alien bath, and Dr. Markum shows up, too. I won't spoil this part of the story, but it does contain my favorite line of dialogue, spoken by Detective Andriotti: "You're fuckin' bananas." 

Breeders would make an appropriate middle section of a triple bill with the last movie I reviewed on this site, Blue Monkey, and C.H.U.D. Like Blue Monkey, Breeders sees a female doctor and a male detective team up to stop a large insectoid creature hatched from a spore in an abandoned stretch of catacombs in or near a hospital (a story told since time immemorial). Like C.H.U.D., Breeders is about human-into-monster transformation originating beneath the city of New York and is slimy and greasy as all get-out. Breeders and C.H.U.D. both share the same makeup effects artist, too.

That special effects and makeup guy is Ed French, who also plays Dr. Markum in one of his rare handful of acting roles. Though the alien itself is mostly a cheap rubber suit, French's transformation, slime, and guts effects are top-notch. French has had one of the longest and most successful FX careers in Hollywood and indie filmmaking. His other credits include Amityville II: The Possession, Sleepaway Camp, Exterminator 2, The Stuff, Blood Rage (one of his other acting roles; he got to decapitate his own character as the head makeup effects guy), Creepshow 2, the Tales from the Darkside TV show, Vampire's Kiss, Prime Evil, The First Power, The Guardian, Terminator 2, Star Trek VI, Hellraiser: Bloodline, The Black Dahlia, Walk Hard, and (really) Paul Blart: Mall Cop, as well as episodes of Six Feet Under, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Monk, and Westworld, and many, many other films, shows, and music videos. Okay, a few more movie titles from the French CV: Geek Maggot Bingo or The Freak from Suckweasel Mountain, Dead Dudes in the House, and Chopper Chicks in Zombietown.

Director Tim Kincaid has also had a lengthy career, albeit an exceedingly strange one. He made his directorial debut in 1973 with a drive-in sexploitation movie called The Female Response before shifting to gay and bisexual porn for the next dozen years under the name Joe Gage (or, occasionally, Mac Larson). His titles in this period include Kansas City Trucking Co., El Paso Wrecking Corp., L.A. Tool & Die (clearly a theme is emerging), Oil Rig #99, Heatstroke, In the Name of Leather, and Orange Hanky Left. In 1986, Kincaid switched back to exploitation, drive-in fare, making cheap women-in-prison, sci-fi, crime thriller, and horror films at a blistering pace. This phase came to an end with a mainstream comedy in 1989 starring Carrie Fisher. It was called She's Back and was a big flop. Kincaid disappeared from film until 2001, when he resumed his gay porn career under his old pseudonym of Joe Gage and delivered a prolific string of adult films until 2017. I can't resist listing more of his filmography. I find porn films dull, but I love porn film titles. The second wave of Joe Gage porn includes Joe Gage Sex Files Vol. 1: Jack-off Party at Billy Bob's (if IMDB is to be trusted, there are 22 sequels), 110 Degrees in Tucson, Tough Guys: Gettin' Off, Lifeguard! The Men of Deep Water Beach, Gunnery Sgt. McCool, Crossing the Line: Cop Shack 2, Campus Pizza, and Jock Park.    

Blue Monkey (William Fruet, 1987)

Never get rid of your VCR. That's one of the top rules of horror movie fandom. For the first time since my review of Blood Beach a few years ago, I went back to the world of videotape for Blue Monkey, a film that has not been released on DVD or Blu-Ray and is not currently streaming. Someone did post it to YouTube, but the sound was out of sync with the image. I have a warm, fuzzy feeling for VHS since I grew up in the '80s, and an '80s movie about a giant bug terrorizing a Canadian hospital is a highly appropriate way to spark up the VCR again.
For a giant bug rampage movie, Blue Monkey has a surprisingly solid cast made up mostly of Canadian comedic actors comfortable with improv and a couple of strong American character actors who had fallen off the Hollywood A-list. The Americans are Susan Anspach and Steve Railsback.

Anspach, who died last year at the age of 75, had a strong run in the early '70s acting in Hal Ashby's The Landlord, Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Herbert Ross and Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam, and Paul Mazursky's Blume in Love (a movie I'm not too fond of, but the cast is wonderful). Her career looks on paper like a switch was flipped. Immediately after the Mazursky film, she did TV movies for the rest of the decade, followed by an erratic string of supporting roles and TV appearances for the remainder of her career. Anspach says she was blackballed from the A-list by Jack Nicholson after a particularly nasty breakup with him in the mid-'70s. I'm inclined to believe her, but whatever happened, she deserved a better career.
Railsback had a brief moment of leading-man fame in the late '70s and early '80s when he played Charles Manson in the Helter Skelter miniseries, Prewitt in the From Here to Eternity miniseries, and the title role in The Stunt Man, where he shared the lead with Peter O'Toole. He's continued to work steadily as an actor in several interesting but lower profile roles in indie, horror, and cult movies.
The Canadians in the cast include a pair of SCTV vets, Joe Flaherty and Robin Duke, Don Lake as an absent-minded entomologist, veteran character actor John Vernon, and future writer/director Sarah Polley, who was eight years old at the time of the film's release. Polley's character delivers the line that gives the film its title, if you're wondering why a movie about a giant bug is called Blue Monkey.
Blue Monkey begins in the greenhouse of excellently named elderly woman Marwella Harbison (Helen Hughes). An elderly gent named Fred (Sandy Webster) stops by to assist with some greenhouse business and ask Marwella out on a date. While examining a rough-looking new plant someone has sent Marwella, Fred cuts his finger on the stem and proceeds to collapse next to his pickup truck a few minutes later. He's rushed to the emergency room and looked after by two doctors, Dr. Rachel Carson (Gwynyth Walsh) (a nod to the Silent Spring author?) and Dr. Judith Glass (Anspach). Meanwhile, a police detective from the city has been shot while pursuing a suspect and is also rushed into the emergency room, accompanied by his partner, Detective Jim Bishop (Railsback). Dr. Carson handles poor Fred, while Dr. Glass moves back and forth between the patients. It's quite an afternoon at this small-town hospital, albeit a small-town hospital with an enormous, futuristic, high-tech genetic research lab that is also mysteriously but conveniently building lasers. (Hey, I just roll with this shit and never doubt it. Each movie lives in its own planet.) Also, this hospital/lab used to house an insane asylum, which explains the maze of corridors that will make our giant bug very happy.

Long story short, when Fred cut his finger, something got inside him, and that something is growing fast and wants out. What initially looks like a large, discolored turd crawling out of the mouth of Fred is our bug in a larval state. When a ragtag group of child patients (including Polley) get into some explore-the-hospital hijinks, they find the bug trapped under glass but unguarded because a couple of hospital employees snuck off to smoke a joint and get it on. The kids decide the bug is hungry, so they pour a random box of blue powder on it, because children are fucking idiots. That blue powder is some kind of genetic growth substance, and our bug, already growing fast, explodes in size. Meanwhile, everyone who had contact with Fred starts getting sick, except for the two patients who snuck in some Jack Daniel's and got wasted. It's like I've been telling everyone for years, booze is good for you.

Wait, I'm not making this long story short. There's a lot going on in this first half, and I didn't even mention the pregnant woman going into labor and the director of the hospital and the smartass kid with leukemia. Things get a lot more focused but also a little duller in the second half, which involves the hospital being quarantined, with orders from the government to blow the place up, killing everyone inside, if the mysterious illness continues to spread (and they don't even know know about the damn bug yet), and a lengthy chase scene between the killer bug, which is actually multiple killer bugs, which are hermaphroditic, which just laid a bunch of eggs, which are turning into little killer bugs, and the hospital staff and patients. Oh shiiiitttt! Good thing they have lasers, for some reason. The second half of the movie is basically Aliens on the supercheap, with lots of running, hiding, and fighting in dimly lit corridors. I was less entertained by this half, but I'm one of those weirdos who generally prefers the buildup to the explosive climax.

Blue Monkey was the last in a long string of horror movies for director William Fruet before he moved on to a lengthy career in television. Fruet got his start in the movie business in a few '60s acting roles, but things really kicked off when he wrote the screenplay for the great Canadian indie Goin' Down the Road, a character-based road movie about a couple of unemployed friends in rural Novia Scotia bored with small-town life who move to Toronto and continue to have a miserable time. The movie plays a bit like what would happen if Mike Leigh wrote Strange Brew and John Cassavetes directed it. I loved it. Fruet also wrote another Canadian indie, Rip-Off, a coming-of-age movie about four teenage boys. After making his debut as director with a heavy drama about rape and family coverups and unwanted pregnancies, Wedding in White, Fruet mostly worked in horror, directing The House by the Lake, Funeral Home, Baker County, U.S.A. (not a title that screams horror movie, but it's one of the many post-Deliverance evil redneck slashers), Spasms, Killer Party, and, of course, Blue Monkey. He also squeezed in an erotic thriller, a vigilante action movie, a documentary, and a TV movie melodrama in between the horror projects. After Blue Monkey, Fruet spent the next 15 years working in television, specializing in horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and action series, and he closed out his career making a few supernatural and sci-fi-themed children's movies, the last one in 2011. He's still with us, and I hope he's enjoying his retirement.