strange object the witnesses assume to be some kind of meteor smashes into the campus of a Boston women's college, breaking open to reveal a number of strange blue crystals and the character the credits refer to as "Space Girl" (Simmons), a scarred woman dressed in shiny tight pants and a shiner pushup bra. Space Girl flees into the night, terrified of a menace also released by the crash: a hulking, slimy monster (Lloyd-Bryan), who soon kills the randy school janitor and begins making off with the nubile college women.
It turns out that the beastie requires human women to complete its life cycle, And that the only hope for the survival of mankind is the dreamy art teacher, Ashley (Jensen), a sensitive, soft-spoken Mark Harmon type whom every sighing student in his class would like to claim as an extracurricular activity.
He does soon begin a relationship with a student (Janus) who turns out to be the type of girl most guys hope to meet in college, who shrieks and leaps on a chair at the sight of a scurrying mouse, but who later angrily pumps a shotgun as she ventures into catacombs to kick slimy alien ass.
Naturally, she mistakes her professor/boyfriend's obsession with the plight of Space Girl as the sign of a wandering eye, but he's just being a concerned citizen.
It all ends with a bevy of mind-controlled girls sleepwalking into the catacombs while the teacher, his beautiful young girlfriend, an exceptionally surly homicide cop, the lady principal and Space Girl all independently make their way into the same tunnels, in search of the monster who likes to encase his female conquests in Freudian sticky white cocoons.
Sex and the single alien
In any grade-Z movie where crashing spaceships disgorge hulking alien monsters who pounce on people from dark places, the questions are obvious. If the beastie is just an inarticulate monster whose chief weapons are claws and teeth, how did his people develop space flight? And if he's a highly intelligent representative of a technologically advanced culture, how come his behavior upon landing on poor old Earth consists of lurking in dark places to snap the necks of men and drool over the breasts of women? How many thousands of years of technological development, involving the usual processes of painstaking research and experimentation, the development of powerful fuels and propulsion systems and life-support equipment, etc., needed to be conducted before his species was ready to send a probe into the vastness of space, all for the purpose of finding a planet suitable for saying "Raarrr" while malevolently stalking through sewers?
Breeders takes things a step further than that, by positing a slimy, Gigeresque alien whose species is able to use human women in its reproductive cycle. The creature is exacting enough to crash its capsule in the center of an all-girls college, and not just any all-girls college, but an all-girls college whose entrance applications, to judge from the one class we get to see in session, must have been cleverly worded to weed out those with acne or bad hair or flabby hips or insufficiently perky breasts. But this, too, leads to obvious questions. If the species in question needs human women in order to perpetuate, how did it maintain its population long enough to crawl out of its own primordial seas, and endure millions of years of evolution, and build a civilization, and develop the brain capacity it needed for those aforementioned thousands of years of technological development, involving the usual processes of painstaking
research and experimentation and so on, before it was able to reach the also aforementioned planet suitable for saying "Raaar" while malevolently stalking through sewers? Maybe it's those very eons of delayed sexual gratification that explains their bad attitude once they get here. If humans had needed to wait that long, we'd be saying "Raaar" and ripping off heads, too.
One thing's for sure: The beasts are randy horndogs. We know this because the woman they abducted and scarred during a previous visit, Space Girl, who we gather has been traveling with these lonely boys for some time, has no evident wardrobe other than a shiny silver outfit with tight pants and a halter that accentuates her cleavage. It makes perfect sense for a clawed, bulletproof Raaar-beast to dress its human captives that way. It also makes sense for the tough, skeptical and exceptionally bored homicide cop to still doubt reports of something seriously wrong when an entire SWAT team fails to report back from a reconnaissance mission in the sewers. It makes even more sense than that for the lady school principal, who spots the creature, to then deny ever having seen anything. It's perfectly logical for the sewers and local fuel storage facility to erupt in huge fireballs the instant the beastie dies. And, finally, it makes the most sense of all for the art professor hero and student heroine trapped in those sewers to engage in the (here paraphrased) dialogue: "We're being chased by alien mutants!" "But we can't go in the water! It's not safe!"
The sad thing, though, is that these comments make the film look like great campy fun, when in fact it's just a slow, dreary mess: perhaps better in its early reels than some of its subgenre in characterizing its human cannon fodder, but dismally ineffective once the monster-movie dynamics take over. Its relatively high grade here is due to its marginal superiority over some of the especially awful DVD releases reviewed in this space in recent months.
