Dark Breed

Some people take films far too seriously!

Like most reviewers or critics for this, Dark Breed.

I picked this up for just a pound and highly enjoyed what I got for it. Action packed from the get-go, Dark Breed is a sci-fi rip off from many Hollywood blockbusters, but it doesn't care, because it's got just as much action, if not more, complete with some incredible stunt work from everyone involved!

Jack Scalia is just great. He isn't a bad actor, he just seems to have gotten trapped in B-movie hell, yet never fails to deliver.

His role in Dark Breed is probably one of his best, and he pulls off the action hero greatly!

Far from perfect, but highly entertaining if you remember not to take it all so seriously. Action fans should definitely check it out, as I feel its being sold more as a sci-fi movie than anything else, yet features some amazing stunt work that deserves to be seen!!

Sh!t from outer space keeps crashing onto earth at the start of this movie. First a spaceship with evil alien parasite-infected astronauts. Then a cocoon-canister with alien eggs. Then another lifepod thing with a female astronaut inhabited by a good alien. The female is the ex-wife of Jack Scalia, and he is the star and co-producer of this thrill-ride sci-fi/horror action-fest (okay, I'm exaggerating things a little bit here). Scalia & his alienized ex-wife have to team up to stop the evil astronauts, as they are here to take over the world (with the bunch of eggs helping them to inevitably create an alien army). There's one cool car-chase sequence early on in the movie (actually, it's a truck-chase sequence and why those aliens decided to steal a truck is beyond me). The rest of the film contains a lot of shooting and military folks running around. The special effects are passable, some highlights: the space shuttle crashing in the harbor, a pretty gory autopsy sequence and two nifty rubber suited aliens near the end. At one point or another, "Dark Breed" might remind you of films like "The Hidden" (good alien teaming up with a human to kill the bad aliens) and perhaps even "Predator" (the facial design of one of the evil aliens). Needles to say those are far better movies than "Dark Breed". But it gains an extra point for blowing up a lot of things.

While I had never seen, nor actually ever heard about, this 1996 sci-fi thriller movie titled "Dark Breed", I have to say that the movie's synopsis sounded interesting enough to make me sit down and watch it, as I had the opportunity to do so here in 2025.

But while the synopsis made the movie sound interesting, writer Richard Preston Jr. Failed to live up to that promise. The storyline in the movie was bland and rather dull, devoid of anything overly interesting. And it was quite a drag to sit through 104 minutes of this ordeal.

There are some familiar faces on the cast list, especially if you watched movies during the 1980s and 1990s, with the likes of Jack Scalia, Cindy Ambuehl, Jonathan Banks, Carlos Carrasco and George 'Buck' Flower. And while the script was subpar, I will say that the acting performances were fair enough.

Visually, the movie was okay. It wasn't impressive special effects, but they were fair enough.

"Dark Breed" was a swing and a miss of a movie, and it is not one that I will be returning to a second time.

My rating of director Richard Pepin's 1996 movie "Dark Breed" lands on a four out of ten stars.

There sure are a lot of panes of glass destroyed in this PM production, involving a bunch of astronauts coming back from space infested with evil aliens hell bent on taking over the Earth. The leader of the aliens is Mike from Breaking Bad, but, you see, he's also still a good guy underneath.

Their former Captain is out to track them down, along with his ex-wife (who also has an alien in her), some evil G-men, etc etc. It's a PM film, and therefore chock-full of car chases, explosions, and a rather large amount of people being thrown through panes of glass.

I was expecting this to be your usual run of the mill 'people running around a warehouse being chased by aliens' film, that only really happens at the end (and via a flashback also). When the aliens do appear, they are rather, eh, Predator like, but I wasn't complaining as they laid waste to all the G-men.

Throw in some mild gore, loads of gunfights, some not bad car chases, and plenty on nineties cheese and you have all you need to pass the time while you're waiting to die.

One thing: In some scenes the alien contact lenses seem to have been inserted incorrectly.

1996 was a busy year for the protagonist of this film as its leading star, 1980's TV heartthrob actor Jack Scalia, a Brooklyn native of Italian descent, featured in not one but two somewhat obscure sci-fi films; 'Dark Breed' and 'The Silencers'. Both of these films suffer from the same problem, that is of having an interesting concept for the story and narrative but which are adapted amateurishly on film.

The plot's tagline for this film is: 'Six astronauts are infected by an alien organism.' Doesn't that sound cool? Well, yeah, but what we have in 'Dark Breed' is anything but. Despite featuring a number of handsome and pretty actors and actresses in its cast, this film never manages to bring out the potential of anyone of them. The editing is poor, and while there are some effects, they do not look at all convincing. The thing is, despite all of this, I do not think that 'Dark Breed' is horrible in any way either. It is certainly mediocre, sure, but I reserve the title of terrible or horrible for films which insult my intelligence or which make me want to stop watching. At least I watched this film until the end and nothing about it was insulting.

'The Silencers', Jack Scalia's other sci-fi film of 1996, is better than this one because for all its mistakes, at least it was not as tedious as this film. With better editing, 'Dark Breed' could have been a memorable sci-fi film, but as it is, it is nothing better than a mediocre and forgettable sci-fi film which, while not terrible in any way, is nothing if not mediocre.