CADE: THE TORTURED CROSSING (2023) * ½

Cade:  The Tortured Crossing is Neil Breen’s sequel to Twisted Pair.  This might be Breen at his Breeniest.  Although I loved Fateful Findings and enjoyed Twisted Pair, my resolve was severely tested with this one.  “Tortured” indeed. 

Breen returns as Cade, the superhuman hero.  He bestows a bunch of money to a hospital sight unseen and is horrified when he learns the place is a dump.  Even worse is the fact the doctors are performing illicit experiments on the patients.  Cade’s evil twin Cale (also Breen) assists the doctors by kidnapping homeless teens in exchange for drugs.  Cade then teaches the teens to fight and together, they take back the hospital. 

There is one scene that is so purely Breenian that it will make your head spin.  I’m tempted not to spoil it for you, but I feel it’s worth mentioning, if only to sort of get you interested, as much of the rest of the film is a slog.  This scene finds Breen walking through a green-screened meadow (99% of the movie uses greenscreen) where he runs into a poorly CGI white tiger and they proceed to fight.  Then, they become friends, and the tiger transforms into a hot babe with big boobs.  This scene is WTF bliss and deserves to be shown in any compilation of Z-grade bad movies.  This moment alone is worth at least One Star in my book. 

There’s another sequence that’s not quite as nutty, but it did make me laugh pretty good.  That was the impromptu dance scene with all the teenage patients.  That was good for a Half-Star.  These two admittedly goofy bits are the only bright spots in the film. 

Sadly, the rest of Cade:  The Tortured Crossing is a mess.  It’s nowhere near as fun as his previous work as the scenes with the patients get repetitive in a hurry.  Sure, there are some chuckles here and there (like when Breen repairs an SUV with his mind), but the awful dialogue and awkward editing just doesn’t quite have the same zest of his previous entries. 

The over-reliance on greenscreen work is mind boggling.  Instead of just finding a location and filming there, Breen just inserts himself and his cast onto stock photos he found on the internet.  Only a director like Neil Breen would do something like this.  Because of that, I guess you could call this technique “Breen screen”.