Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader writers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, staff writer Leor Galil tries to fathom the works of Neil Breen.
In Twisted Pair, Breen plays twins Cade and Cale. During their childhood, they were kidnapped by a mysterious being who combines their DNA with artificial intelligence for some reason. Cade and Cale hone their powers with this mysterious creature, which briefly appears in the form of a rotund, animated 3D head that looks like it was made for a Windows screen saver in the 90s. At some point, one of the twins begins to fail in his training exercises, and ultimately exiles himself. You can tell the twins apart because the one who sticks with the training and becomes all-powerful (Cade) is clean shaven, whereas the “black sheep” twin (Cale) sports a fake beard.
Yet there’s something undeniably fascinating about his output. Twisted Pair doesn’t make much sense, it drags in parts, and it sometimes resembles the ramblings of a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist. But, somehow, Breen unexpectedly emerges with flecks of gold, little moments that have stubbornly attached themselves to my memory, such as the scene in Fateful Findings when his character screams “No more books!” and throws a book at one of his many laptops, or the scene in Twisted Pair when Cade plants a “bomb” inside a green-screen “lab” and then trips while running away from the eventual blast (why didn’t Breen just reshoot that part?). At this point I’m familiar with Breen’s stilted acting, his awkward dialogue, and his narrative universe—and still he finds a way to make something I could never have predicted.
