Dark Breed pits some of the hardest hombres in NASA up against an interstellar menace, hell bent on decimating human kind. Nick Saxon (played by Jack Scalia) leads the NASA team when a space shuttle returning from a mission splashes down in the middle of an American city. Time is against them as soon the enemy (known only as the dark breed) will multiply and if that happens, it’s game over.
This is a really predictable movie, filled with more cliches than I could throw a stick at. It’s got the rough, jaded, good guy, good looking damsels in distress, villainous deceitful traitors and a space monster that looks like a crocodile’s arse. The storyline is certainly not this movie’s strong point. In fact it’s hard to find a strong point in this movie at all. It’s filled with relatively decent action however, which helps the movie to no end from becoming a real bore fest. During the mid 90’s there was spate of action flicks that had seemed to get kicks at defying the laws of physics and Dark Breed doesn’t escape this. Hand grenades are only dangerous if your standing 1 foot from them, bullets are only lethal if your playing a minor role… You get the idea.
The pacing is decent enough, it doesn’t slow down for very long and it could be argued that this is detrimental to the movie, cause Dark Breed comes away as a very shallow movie in a lot of regards. I think the acting quality plays a part in that though. The actors in this movie don’t really come across as if they’re taking the whole thing very seriously. Dark Breed is by no means a serious movie, but if your gonna do it, do it proper. As a consequence the characters are just lame, i mean really lame, and the bad guy/ monster is a joke to be honest. Corny, cheesy banter that really is as unscary as it gets.
Gore wise Dark Breed is fairy minimal, there’s a couple of scenes that are kinda grizzly but nothing major. Most of the effects are done via CGI, which for a mid 90’s bmovie look as unbelievable as it gets. So is Dark Breed worth the time to dig out? Not really. It’s OK in parts but it’s just too lame in many ways to justify a full recommendation. Perhaps worth watching if you can catch it for free on some late night TV network but other than that best avoid.
Movie Details
Director: Richard Pepin
Writer: Richard Preston Jr
Actors: Robin Curtis, George ‘Buck’ Flower, Donna W. Scott, Cindy Ambuehl
Release Year: 1996