I worship at the altar of trash, by which I mean that I am one of those cinephiles with a fondness for bad movies. Perhaps I am underselling the corpus I have in mind by calling it merely “bad,” and understating my sect’s feeling by calling it merely “fondness.” The movies my fellow-cultists and I most esteem are not just bad but incredibly, impressively terrible—scrambled, technically maladroit, incomprehensible at the level of basic plotting—and we are not just fond but obsessed, digging through piles of bric-a-brac at thrift stores in hope of uncovering forgotten VHS tapes from the eighties, scrolling to neglected corners of YouTube with the goal of alighting on some near-unwatchable monstrosity with thirty-two views and a handful of affronted comments.
But we, too, are discerning; we do not approve of just any bad movie. The train wrecks we love feature amateur actors and dialogue so garbled that it may well have been translated from a foreign language by a non-native speaker (as it probably was in the case of “Troll 2,” about which more later). The sound quality is scratchy; the camerawork is nauseating, and not in a chicly experimental way. The movies in the good-because-bad canon are not forgettably bad, like cheesy Hallmark fare or the thousandth predictable sequel in a superhero franchise; they are not skillfully and expensively bad, like botched Oscar bait. Nor are they quite like the gripping yet ultimately shallow entertainments that Pauline Kael defended in her classic 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” published in Harper’s. No, our bad movies are monumental feats of incompetence, inspired in their badness, bad in ways I could never have dreamed a film could be bad, so feverishly and outlandishly bad that they have bodied forth a new aesthetic category.
These trash movies, as I have taken to calling them, to distinguish them from prestige failures, do not quite constitute a genre, the way the thriller or the rom-com does. They do not treat any subjects in particular, or hew to any specific conventions, or share any consistent visual signature. The trash movie is more a matter of sensibility than it is of thematic preoccupation or stylistic continuity. It is difficult to pin down its hallmarks, except to insist that it would find even the smallest dose of self-awareness fatal. “Intending to be campy is always harmful,” Susan Sontag wrote, in 1964, of the exaggerated and mannered affect called camp. Intending to be trash is even more dangerous. When it comes to the singular alchemy that transforms garden-variety badness into sublime disastrousness, earnest attempts at capital-“S” seriousness are best. But, beyond emphasizing that trash thrives in the chasm between ambition and accomplishment, I struggle to generalize.
It helps, of course, if a movie is a sequel, preferably one that has little or nothing to do with its predecessor, like the 1990 masterpiece “Troll 2” (which is completely unrelated to “Troll,” an innocuous 1986 flick about a little girl terrorized by a troll, and which features no trolls, only goblins). It also helps if a film was made on a shoestring budget, for which reason there is a large margin of overlap between trash and pulpy B movies. But it would be a mistake to presume that the difference between rote badness and delicious catastrophe is just the difference between the highbrow and the low, or the difference between the well-funded and the cheap. Costly movies like “Cats” (2019) and “Megalopolis” (2024) contrive to qualify as trash, and B movies with no funding to speak of often manage to evince real merit. I would defend the 1989 extravaganza “Society” (a film that defies ready summary but which features at least one literal butt-head—that is, a butt with a face on it) as an actual good movie with eccentric charm.
Still, for every resourceful, imaginative low-budget success, there is a bungled movie that aspires, if not to quality, then at least to financial viability, but instead achieves legendary ineptitude. Unsurprisingly, many of the films in this last category are trash classics: in the grand tradition inaugurated by “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (1958), one of the first movies to be celebrated for being so bad that it’s perversely captivating, are “Manos: The Hands of Fate” (1966), “Space Mutiny” (1988), “Miami Connection” (1988), “Hard Ticket to Hawaii” (1987), “Samurai Cop” (1991), “Sister Sensei” (1994), and many more.
I am a friend to all improvidently bad movies, and I would never turn up a chance to watch a samurai-themed obscurity from the eighties, but my absolute favorite kind of trash is the vanity project. Movies in this class are, paradigmatically, produced, written, and directed by the same person, who generally also plays the devastatingly handsome romantic lead (and often funds the proceedings with money earned in some unrelated capacity). The most famous bad movie of all time, and the first one I ever watched, “The Room” (2003), stars the man who wrote, directed, produced, and bankrolled it: the incorrigible Tommy Wiseau, a mysterious figure with a vampiric mien who wears sunglasses inside. Another celebrated example, “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” (2010), was produced, written, and directed by the tech salesman James Nguyen, who did not star in his opus but did drive around the Sundance Film Festival in a minivan with what looked like a taxidermic bird affixed to the antenna, handing out flyers to promote a screening at a local bar.
But it must be conceded that Nguyen and even Wiseau are lesser talents. To understand bad movies, it is crucial to understand their most distinguished representative, the ultimate trash auteur: an enigmatic man named Neil Breen.
If Wiseau is the Steven Spielberg of bad movies, Breen is the Ingmar Bergman. His œuvre encompasses seven feature films, the first of which, “Double Down,” was released in 2005, and the most recent of which, “Dire Duplicity,” came out just this spring. These masterpieces are more esoteric than “The Room,” but widely recognized by connoisseurs as the weirdest of the weird, the trashiest of the trashy.
Breen enthusiasts, myself among them, often find themselves asking: what is this man’s deal? The answer is: no one knows, and everyone enjoys not knowing. Breen claims to have funded his first couple of movies with income he earned as an architect and financed his later movies with the proceeds from the earlier ones. At one point he had a real-estate license, though whether he has ever sold a house is anybody’s guess. Even his age is disputed: according to IMDb, he is sixty-seven, and obsessives who managed to dig up an old yearbook photo of one Cornelius Francis Breen allege that he graduated from high school in 1964 and that his birth year is most likely 1946, which would put him at seventy-nine. For his part, Breen says that both dates are false and that the yearbook picture (which bears a striking resemblance to him) is a different person. When pressed about his age, he said only that he is “a young man.”
It is impossible to date Breen just by looking at him; his face has the inelastic, ageless quality of a synthetic substance. When the character that he plays in his 2016 film “Pass Thru” explains that he is an alien who moves from one “time plane” to another, he is more right than he seems to know. All things considered, it is appropriate that Breen is, somehow, simultaneously sixty-seven, seventy-nine, and a “young man”: the strangeness of his work and its accoutrements warps the very fabric of space-time. The websites for each of his movies have plain backgrounds and unfussy font choices that put me in mind of pages coded in HTML and accessed on a desktop with a gurgling internet connection in the family study circa 2003. Each site features a low-res photograph of a film cover that appears to have been designed on early-two-thousands Photoshop. The associated e-mail addresses are all, appropriately, AOL. His frame of reference is a mystery: when asked about his favorite directors in Q. & A.s, he habitually dismisses the question, leading some fans to speculate that he has never seen a movie that he did not direct. “I feel like Neil never actually watched any movies,” wrote the top commenter on a popular YouTube video about Breen. “He just heard what they were and tried it for himself.”
Even if Breen has, in fact, seen a movie, he is such a sui-generis phenomenon that he may as well not have. The facts of his biography, no matter how outrageous, could not possibly explain the sheer derangement of his output. It is hard to say what, exactly, happens in any of his movies, each of which is a convoluted farrago of espionage, deceit, villainy, and futuristic imagery that makes heavy use of green screen and that—not to put too fine a point on it—makes absolutely no sense. Nonetheless, his corpus boasts certain continuities and several recurring motifs. He is fond of technobabble, and phrases like “programmable virtual reality” are often bandied about without much clarification. He stars in every movie he directs, playing a glamorous figure fighting a shadowy cabal of nefarious élites. He is, variously, a hacker (“Double Down,” “Fateful Findings”), a vigilante with superpowers (“Twisted Pair,” “Cade: The Tortured Crossing,” and somehow also “Fateful Findings”), and an alien or an A.I.-augmented warrior who hopes to purify humanity of its lesser elements (“Twisted Pair,” “Cade: The Tortured Crossing,” “Pass Thru,” “I Am Here. . . . Now”). Perhaps inadvertently, his movies tend to thematize his outsider position: in all of them, he is a savior approaching humanity from beyond its mores, with some degree of confusion. In several, he is literally from outer space.
Breen’s gestures toward political grievance never coalesce into coherent complaints—who would want them to?—but they have a vaguely libertarian flavor. His enemies are named with both absolute specificity and absolute generality in close to every film. They include “the stockbrokers,” “the C.E.O.s,” “the bankers” (sometimes also “the international bankers”), “the insurance companies,” and, especially, “the politicians.” In a notorious and oft-memed scene at the end of “Fateful Findings,” the character that Breen plays announces that he has hacked “into government and corporate systems all over the country,” uncovering what he earlier described as “national and international corruption,” and prompting the criminals he has unmasked to kill themselves onscreen. “I resign today as president of the bank,” a sallow man proclaims, as if there were just one bank in the world, before shooting himself in the head. The moment sounds darker than it is, largely because the gun looks plastic, and the explosion is obviously C.G.I. A montage with a similarly unsubtle message in “Pass Thru” has attained an exalted status among Breen devotees. This time, his character materializes at a series of gatherings where lawyers, politicians, and bankers (sometimes played by confusingly overlapping actors) nurse cocktails and amiably confess to manipulating the public. “Isn’t that corrupt?,” Breen intones. “Isn’t that corrupt?” has since become a catchphrase.
Breen’s films are a curious blend of unintelligibility and over-explication. In one characteristic sequence (which I confess to quoting at every opportunity), a character tells her travelling companion, apropos of nothing, “Your mother is my sister! She was murdered! I swore to God I’d take care of you! You’re my niece!” Expository voice-overs are common. “We were subjected to reprogramming of our D.N.A. and cells, making us more humanoid, with superior powers,” booms the voice of Breen’s character at the start of “Twisted Pair.” But, above all, what makes a Breen movie a Breen movie is that it is a one-man show. Fans have designed T-shirts that lovingly mock the credit sequences: “Written, directed, produced, casted, starring, lighting design, financed, catered, and makeup by NEIL BREEN” [sic]. Many are shot, at least in part, at his house in Nevada, and feature his pool, his Rolls-Royce, and his Ferrari (which sports a license plate that reads, incredibly, “FARRARI”). Some are filmed in the nearby desert, and at least two include scenes shot at the Nevada State University campus, which is supposed to stand in for an operational headquarters (though signs designating a computer lab and a study room are clearly legible on the walls). The special effects are jerkily unrealistic, resembling the graphics in The Sims. It is not unusual for a Breen film to recycle the same sequence of stock footage several times.
Breen has found his actors, some of them virtual amateurs, by advertising on Craigslist, the now defunct Backpage, and “a couple of those kinds of things,” as he put it at a recent event. Cast members are not given full scripts, and several claim they were told what to say on the spot, which would account for their deer-in-headlights delivery. (Breen said that he gives actors the sections that relate to their characters ahead of time.) One wonders, however, how the auteur himself manages to seem so extraterrestrial when he recites the lines that he himself wrote. My friend Austin, who has impeccable taste in bad movies and other internet esoterica, reflected on Breen’s uncanny charisma during a recent phone call. “Breen is completely wooden, with the strangest expressions on his face all the time,” he said. Then he added wonderingly, almost tenderly, “It’s strangely magnetic.” So it is.
Breen claims that his films are profitable, and I believe him. Whenever he announces, often in an impromptu X post, that he has a new movie screening in cinemas around the country, hundreds flock to see the latest work of “the Breenius.” Since 2020, when a friend introduced me to the delirium of Breen’s filmography, I had been anxiously awaiting my own chance to watch his bafflements on the big screen. So, when Breen revealed, with his customary abruptness, that his seventh feature film, “Dire Duplicity,” would première at the Independent Filmmakers Showcase’s L.A. Film Festival on May 15th, I knew that I had to go. If Breen’s avatars could travel from the future or the furthest reaches of the galaxy to search out the corrupt politicians, I could travel two thousand miles to ask my fellow-fanatics what distinguished our hero’s work from the bad movies that normal people came across in the course of their normal lives, what differentiated it from Christmas specials and stale action flicks, what made it a flare from another universe.
