Creator / Neil Breen

aka: Pass Thru

Sheer Breenius.

"I can't believe you committed suicide. I cannot believe you committed suicide. How could you have done this? How could you have committed suicide?"

— Dylan (played by Breen), upon finding his friend Jim dead, Fateful Findings

Neil Francis Breen (born November 23, 1958) is a Las Vegas-based real-estate agent and architect, but is more well-known for his forays into independent filmmaking since the mid-2000s. As a director/writer/producer/actor/art director/head financier/editor/composer/caterer, he's created a series of films dealing with supernatural events, government conspiracies, untrustworthy men in high places, marital strife, loneliness, and a moral center saving the others from their corruptness. And they all stink on ice.

Over the course of the 2010s, Breen came into Internet infamy, thanks in part to reviewers such as RedLetterMedia, YourMovieSucks.org, The Cinema Snob and Space Ice taking on his efforts. The incompetence of his films, from acting to production value, takes on new levels of So Bad, It's Good that have yet to be seen on film. Not only has this propelled him to cult stardom, but he's used this newfound popularity to his advantage, having his fans support the funding of his films rather than having to finance them himself.

In spite of his reputation, Breen is genuinely a stellar example of what a true independent filmmaker can be. The fact that he is a man who doesn't need to do what he does but chooses to simply because he's so passionate about it, and a man who remains committed to his artistic visions, is something that his fans find legitimately inspiring. Not only that, but because his films have increasingly relied on crowdfunding, they're coming out more and more often, a far cry from the days when they were released every three to five years on the salaries from his day jobs.

If you want to keep up with the man's myth and legend, you can find him on Twitter and YouTube.

Filmography

• Double Down (2005)
• I Am Here....Now (2009)
• Fateful Findings (2013)
• Pass Thru (2016)
• Twisted Pair (2018)
• The Neil Breen 5-Film Retrospective (2020)
• Cade: The Tortured Crossing (2023)

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• Accidental Aiming Skills: In Fateful Findings, Amy somehow gets a perfect headshot through her husband's skull... despite aiming for his car.
• The Ace: Neil seems to really love this trope, since all of his protagonists are inexplicably the best at what they do if they're not already a Physical God. Aaron Brand of Double Down in particular describes himself as this.
• Always Identical Twins:
  • Completely averted in I Am Here....Now. Despite Amber and Cindy being repeatedly stated to be twins, they don't even look remotely similar to each other. In fact, their actresses aren't even related.
  • Cade and Cale play this straight, however, since both of them are played by Neil himself with very little attempt at making them the least bit distinct from one another.
• Anachronism Stew: Laptops and flip phones aside, Neil makes no attempt to properly depict an accurate Period Piece. The prologue to Fateful Findings is supposed to be set several decades prior to present day, yet Leah's parents somehow possess a Lexus RX 330 that debuted in 2003, and a 2010 Ford Fusion can be seen in the background when the camera shifts to young Dylan standing in the middle of the road.
• Arc Words: Appear frequently in his films. The character played by Breen will often repeat them incessantly. If they're really important, other characters will say them as well.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Should you decide to consume immense quantities of canned tuna like Aaron Brand does in Double Down, you would find yourself afflicted with a severe case of mercury poisoning in very short order. Must have been his "bio-electro-medical implants" at work.
  • The wheelchair-bound old man in I Am Here....Now bemoans his ailing health and the futility of the numerous chemotherapy sessions he's been through. This same old man has a full head of hair and a beard worthy of Santa Claus, despite full-body hair loss being one of the main side effects of chemotherapy that wouldn't subside until at least half a year after treatment has ended.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: Any trained firearm enthusiast would cringe into their own ribcage at the ridiculously Reckless Gun Usage in Neil's films. Most of the time, his characters would fire wildly at nothing in particular, holster "hot" firearms in their pants or pockets, aim at other people around them with their fingers on the trigger, or even pointing the guns at themselves just to look "cool" or "crazy". Semi-justified in-universe at least, since many of these characters are often mentally-unhinged criminals or crime lords who treat others like garbage anyway, though the characters played by Neil himself run afoul of this every now and then, even though they're portrayed as the most intelligent or level-headed ones.
• Artistic License – Law Enforcement: In Double Down, Aaron's attack on Las Vegas involves him first distracting officials via launching several attacks in other countries, even though the Las Vegas police, FBI, and the United States in general wouldn't be involved with investigating those attacks.
• Artistic License – Medicine:
  • Every character with substance abuse in Neil's films are instantly affected by whatever they take, however they take it, whether it is heroin or normal medication. They even overdose immediately after taking the drugs if Neil intends for them to die, despite the process being very drawn-out and gruesome in reality, though in this case it's probably for the better that we don't get to see it.
  • You don't get to just stop taking your medication at the drop of a hat like Dylan/Neil does in Fateful Findings, especially if those were prescribed to improve your condition after recovering from a near-death experience, like a car crash for example. Even if his recovery is nothing short of miraculous, he still seemed to suffer from residual pains, which is what his meds are likely for, which goes away immediately after he stops taking them.
• Artistic License – Pharmacology: A drug addict in I Am Here....Now manages to completely miss his vein and injects instead into an artery. He doesn't even use a tourniquet to find a vein.
• Artistic License – Space: In I Am Here....Now, The Being claims to have had much better success at sowing life on the other planets in the solar system, complete with highly-improbable ecosystems whose population have apparently advanced enough to grasp the importance of nature and respect it. This is neverminding the fact that Venus and Mercury are too close to the Sun and have atmospheres too toxic to support life, and the other planets barring Earth and Mars are all gas giants, with even worse atmospheric compositions than the former two.
• Aside Glance: The actress playing Aly pulls a really slow one in frustration in possibly the most uncomfortable scenes in Fateful Findings; Neil being Neil, however, just Left It In.
• Bait-and-Switch: In Twisted Pair, the protagonist breaks into a woman's house and attacks her in an apparent attempt to rape her. Then it turns out that they're actually a couple role-playing. It's probably supposed to be a nod to the famous Bait-and-Switch scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Sundance forces Etta to perform a Shameful Strip before revealing that it's just a sex game. In this film, however, the "lovers" get into a violent fistfight, complete with our hero calling his girlfriend a bitch.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: The (correct) married couple in Double Down decided to off themselves on their own accord rather than being kidnapped, tortured, and possibly murdered by Aaron Brand.
• Black-and-White Morality: His films make it very clear who are supposed to be the bad guys and who are supposed to be the good guys. Don't expect anyone to have a moral dilemma.
• Broken Record: Characters in his movies have this strange tendency to repeat whatever they've just said, occasionally several times in a row, but mostly just Neil. He is particularly guilty of this, which is made worse (or better, depending on how you slice it) by how he's compelled to add a Beat in between each repetition.
  The Being: "Why are the humans failing?...I've given them everything...I've given them everything...Everything..."
• Captain Obvious: Most of the fundamentals Neil teaches in The Neil Breen Five-Film Retrospective are common sense to anyone who's watched at least one behind-the-scenes featurette or commentary track of a film's DVD release. For example, he dedicates over an hour discussing what makes a good "character image", but it never goes beyond the superficial.
• Card-Carrying Villain: The villains of his movies will outright admit to being corrupt and love every moment of it. Don't expect any motive beyond that.
• Chest of Medals: Near the end of Double Down, Aaron Brand puts on a denim vest with an assortment of military medals. Yes, that includes the Purple Heart.
• Chroma Key: Neil's films incrementally feature more and more green screen usage, and all of it is terribly done. Cade: The Tortured Crossing in particular more or less looks like an FMV game from the 1990s.
• Cold Ham: Neil's protagonists always manage to be both stiff as a board and deliciously hammy at the same time. All that Dull Surprise helps out a lot, no doubt.
  • This comes up several times throughout the course of every film, but Fateful Findings takes the cake with the scene where Dylan finds Jim dead in his garage, having supposedly shot himself. Dylan's dialogue was apparently supposed to be heart-wrenching and emotional, due to Jim being his best friend and all, but Neil's stiff and monotonous delivery coupled with emphasis on the wrong words make it sound more tired and disappointed than anything else, almost like a parent who can't get their kids to listen.
  • In the same film, Dylan's reaction when he discovers the female doctor to have been Leah all this time sounds more like an angry parent chastising their kid than someone reuniting with his childhood sweetheart.
  • A girl watches her boyfriend get shot by gang members in I Am Here....Now. Her reaction shot starts off with an utterly blank expression, followed by a blood-curdling scream while not changing her expression other than to open her mouth, then back to the same blank look. And then she pukes.
• The Comically Serious: All of his film plots are meant to be taken as unironically and seriously as humanly possible, and his protagonists are always unflinchingly stoic, which actually make them unintentionally hilarious when put on full display alongside the low-quality filmmaking and stiff acting.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: All his films feature untrustworthy, wealthy business leaders acting for their personal greed and self-interests, counter to the morality and values that are championed by Neil Breen.
• Crack is Cheaper: The Neil Breen Five-Film Retrospective, which is actually a five-hour filmmaking course taught by the man himself, retails for a whopping $160. That's cheaper than most college film courses, but the dubious quality of instruction (which, as mentioned elsewhere on the page, are things that one could see on the behind-the-scenes featurette or commentary track of any film's DVD release) isn't worth nearly that much money.
• Creator Provincialism: Las Vegas, Nevada (where Breen lives) and the deserts surrounding it appear as settings.
• Creator Thumbprint: His films usually feature:
  • A protagonist who is morally superior to the other character, who is granted supernatural abilities that approach god-like or who is a straight up god, always played by Neil Breen.
  • Supernatural events affecting the normal state of the world.
  • The landscapes of Nevada, and driving through them. Expect desert skulls to be featured.
  • Promoting specific forms of technological innovation as useful for the advancement of human life, often opposed by or corrupted by government and corporate business.
  • Laptops being thrown around, having coffee spilt on them or generally being abused
  • Characters flailing around like they never moved before in their lives.
  • Dead wife and/or wife who has no bra. No bras at all for any female characters, to be precise.
  • Characters filmed from the neck up with the sky as a background so that their scenes may be inserted anywhere in the story regardless of that location of the scene. Alternatively, so that scenes can be filmed in public without worrying about what's happening in the background.
  • Characters unable to refer to anything using proper nouns or specific names, i.e. The Morally Bankrupt Banker who is simply president of "the bank"; world leaders eliminated by Breen at the end of Pass Thru are "the President" and "the Prime Minister"; elected politicians in "the legislature" have no party affiliation.
  • Denim. Lots and lots of denim. No matter the film, someone has to wear jeans at one point or another. Almost everybody wears jeans in fact, except for those designated to play the Corrupt Corporate Executive, who infallibly wear suits all the time, even at night. Bonus points goes to Neil himself, who wore nothing but denim at times in Double Down and Pass Thru.
  • Young and/or beautiful women inexplicably falling in love with Neil's protagonist. Bonus points if they also forget about their former partner or spouse entirely when they become the protagonist's Love Interest.
• Crusading Widower: In both Double Down and Fateful Findings, his character loses their significant other, though both films take drastically different approaches to it: While the former plays it straight as it implies that his girlfriend being killed is a major motivation for his character's hacking activities, in the latter it is subverted, as it initially appears that it will also motive his character's research... before he becomes reacquainted with his childhood sweetheart, after which he gets along quite fine soon enough.
• Cyberpunk: His films try to show advanced science superimposed with a dark and cynical view of society, emphasis on "try." Albeit in a very low-budget form.
• Death of the Hypotenuse: In "Fateful Findings", Neil's wife dies of a drug overdose which allows him to hook up with his old childhood friend.
• Department of Redundancy Department: One of the things in development by the ominous council of corrupt business people in Twisted Pair is, among other things, programmable virtual reality, as though virtual reality itself isn't already that by nature. This is then repeated seemingly for no reason other than the second actor being given the wrong cues.
• Distracted by the Sexy: In I Am Here....Now, an overheard conversation between the two female leads is apparently so sexy that a passing cyclist crashes his bike and says "wow" over and over again.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Punishments are meted out extremely harshly in the Neil Breen cinematic universe. Almost all crimes and corruption are invariably punishable by death, no matter how petty or insignificant, and on the rare occasions somebody isn't killed horribly by Neil's protagonist, they're still rather painfully maimed, such as the one guy who pushes a dying old man in a wheelchair over in I Am Here...Now and gets blinded for it. Conversely, perceived good deeds are rewarded extremely generously by comparison, like the same old man being given the gift of health and youth, on top of a trophy wife and child, despite his most notable deed merely being him returning the toy dropped by a baby.
• Die, Chair, Die!: If laptops appear in his films, do expect them to be bludgeoned, smashed, or otherwise physically damaged at least five times per movie.
• Dramatic Ellipsis:
  • The title of ''I Am Here....Now", which has one more dot than an ellipsis should have. Adam of YMS.org never fails to read the title off as written: "I Am Here. (long pause) Now."
  • Likewise, the hosts of Good Bad or Bad Bad always call the film "I Am Here Dot Dot Dot Dot Now".
• Driven to Suicide: The ending of Fateful Findings includes several corrupt businessmen committing suicide just as Dylan is revealing what he found on them because they can't risk going to prison for the things they did.
• Dull Surprise: The greatest tool, or perhaps deterrent, in Breen's arsenal as an actor. Due to his incredibly stiff upper face, all of Neil's expressions aside from indifference seem extremely forced and deadpan, making it all but impossible to take his performances seriously, despite him putting in great effort to present himself as a dramatic actor.
• Everybody Has Standards: The three Corrupt Corporate Executives in I Am Here....Now may be greedy and politically-unscrupulous, but they apparently draw the line at Cold-Blooded Torture and want out of the deal when the gang they're partnered with started beating an undercover cop to death. Confusingly subverted in that they still appear to be participating in the beatdown when The Being froze everyone a minute later.
• Fanservice: His earlier films often include scenes of partially-nude young women just because. Also, bras don't seem to exist in the universe of his movies.
• Fan Disservice: Even though the actresses are physically beautiful, every one of them who does a nude scene is clearly very uncomfortable being there. There are also nude scenes of himself. The pool scene in Double Down even shows flashes of his genitals.
  The Cinema Snob: [in his review of Double Down] I now know what Neil Breen's balls look like...and they don't have Mark Shannon's warts, so there's that.^ExplanationMark Shannon was an Italian pornstar whose films Snob reviewed, and much to his disgust, in the first film of his that he reviewed, he discovered that he had genital warts.
• Filler: The five-hour long Neil Breen Five-Film Retrospective serves as this in the greater context of Breen's filmography, as he waits for someone to bankroll his next project.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: In Twisted Pair, Cade is a heroic Super-Soldier, Cale is a sadistic vigilante and domestic abuser, and Cuzzx is a drug kingpin trying to Take Over the World.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: In I Am Here....Now, a random man plays Russian Roulette with a self-loading pistol, rather than a revolver. Despite shooting the gun just before and just after this, he somehow doesn't blow his brains out.
• Healing Hands: A common power for Breen's characters to possess.
  Thgil: You are now free... of PTSD.
  PTSD Survivor: Thank you for freeing me.
• Hollywood Hacking: Done using multiple broken laptops that are not connected to anything (or even turned on for that matter), and that's about it. The same laptops that he keeps smashing several times per movie. The audience is never shown what goes into the hacking, we just see Neil typing furiously at the keyboard for two-thirds of a movie's runtime, and in the end something comes of it. Perhaps the best example of this is when Aaron Brand is able to somehow hack into a normal car, with just his cellphone.
  • Apparently, top-secret government and corporate servers are very easy to poke into in-universe, since even an otherwise normal writer like Dylan from Fateful Findings seem to be able to do so without a hitch, and he also somehow inexplicably knows exactly what to look for.
• Homeless Hero: In Double Down, Aaron Brand does his contract hacking and assassination work while living in his car and eating nothing but canned tuna, all in the middle of the desert. This gets a bit ridiculous when he casually mentions that he makes tens of millions from his work, but donates everything to charity. Surely nobody would mind if he kept a tiny portion of his pay for himself so he didn't have to live in squalor.
• I Am the Noun: Twisted Pair gives us this rare gem:
  Cade: I don't need to carry a weapon! I AM the weapon!
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy:
  • In Fateful Findings, Amy somehow manages to completely miss the huge red Ferrari that she's actually trying to shoot, and puts a bullet in her own husband's head.^note Given the position of Jim's head wound, Breen's intention may have been that the bullet ricocheted off the car and hit him, but this would make even less sense, as a bullet powerful enough to penetrate anyone's skull would tear through a car's body like tissue paper.
  • Actually just about anyone with a gun in Neil's movies except for the man himself tend to have the accuracy of a blind armadillo. Granted, they're most commonly shooting at Neil's protagonists most of the time, so them missing all of their shots can be handwaved as intentional to portray the main characters as Invincible Heroes.
• Info Dump:
  • Expect a metric ton of these in all of Neil's films. Nobody seems to grasp what Show, Don't Tell means, and will spout torrents of exposition at the drop of a hat because Neil can't ever be subtle with his writing.
    Dylan: I'm going to continue hacking into these government systems... *TAP TAP TAP* ...to see what I can find out... *TYPE TYPE TYPE* ...about all this naaaaaational and international corruption I KNOW is going on... *TAP TAP TAP* ...
  • His earlier films such as Double Down and I Am Here....Now seem to fluctuate between this and being needlessly cryptic for no apparent reason. There never seems to be "just enough" exposition in his masterful writing.
• Informed Attribute: Usually applied to Neil's protagonists. Them being The Ace and Invincible Heroes is a given, but their most prominent virtues are almost always described by someone else, instead of Neil actually having his characters demonstrating them. Most typically, Neil really loves the Hollywood Hacking trope, and is established in many films to be a genius hacker, yet displays total cluelessness when actually handling technology at the same time.
  • Double Down in particular is ridiculous about this, with Aaron Brand being shilled as the best and a genius by almost everybody he meets, including himself, yet the only thing he manages to accomplish throughout the whole movie is killing a married couple that he picked up by mistake.
  • On a meta level, Neil insists that all of his films were professionally made despite their indie nature, with him allegedly hiring talented actors and crew to assist with the production. The overall low quality of his films and the stiff, unnatural acting disagree with this, and the credits of any given Neil Breen movie instantly reveals how much of the production was handled by Neil himself.
• Insistent Terminology: In The Neil Breen 5-Film Retrospective, Neil boasts repeatedly about making "five theatrical, professionally shot, professionally made, independently produced feature films". He's adamant that it's "not a documentary", even if all evidence points to the contrary.
• Instant Death Bullet: Almost every gunshot in Neil's movies cause instant fatalities. Either the victim goes slack immediately, or the camera will cut to the dead body after the gun fires. Even if the shot is fired into the back or stomach, which might not be instantly fatal.
• Invincible Hero: Neil's protagonists are always these, although "hero" is sometimes dubious. Regardless of whether they're mortal or straight up Physical God, nothing ever seem to faze them, and Neil always possesses dramatically-broken powers that render any attempt at fighting him into a Curb-Stomp Battle in his favor.
  • To make things more frustrating, he is almost universally-praised by every character in a given movie, yet the segments where Neil is actually on-screen usually have him do very little, if anything, to match his Informed Attributes. And whenever he does do something, it's usually the plot bending over backwards to have him win by way of a deus ex machina, instead of his protagonists emerging victorious by their own merits.
• Jerkass:
  • Expect at least one character in each of his movies to be a dick to someone just to be petty or for no reason at all.
  • In fact, Neil's protagonists often cause mass deaths or unnecessary suffering to the "evil" characters on levels way above their own villainy. Disproportionate Retribution alone won't cut it.
• Kavorka Man: Let's face it, Neil is not a very good looking man, even for his age. Yet, very beautiful (and young) women will just drop into his lap seemingly at the drop of a hat. Many of his love interests will appear to be several decades younger than Neil himself, despite ostensibly being of the same age in-universe.
• The Klutz: The characters in his films are constantly falling, flailing, dropping stuff, bumping into each other, and simply floundering through their daily lives. This is probably a result of limited rehearsal time and filming few takes.
• Large Ham: The woman leader in Pass Thru often screams every single one of her lines. Also, Jim's wife often says her lines in a dramatic way sorta like a valley girl.
• Leave the Camera Running: A common element in most of his films, where certain scenes are shot in one long, continuous take without the camera moving. Supposedly done for dramatic effect, this usually backfires since in most of those cases, the characters in frame have nothing to say, or even do.
  • Reaches new and uncomfortable heights in Fateful Findings, during the scene where Dylan finds Aly trying to sneak a bubble bath in his bathroom. The then goes on to (emotionlessly) reprimand her and ask her not to do it again, repeating similar lines over and over again in a continuous shot for about five minutes. It went on for so long that, at one point, the actress playing Aly momentarily broke character and glanced at the camera in frustration. Neil being Neil, he didn't even bother cutting that part out.
• Magic Realism: The fantastical elements in his films aren't treated as a big deal by the otherwise normal characters. Either that, or an effect of the crappy acting.
• May–December Romance: Not strictly mentioned, but rather implied. The love interests in his films are always portrayed by very young women, while Neil was in his 50s through most of his films (being in his late 40s while filming his first film Double Down), and usually goes without even the least bit of makeup to make him seem younger than he really is. The implication is that Neil's protagonists and the love interests are of roughly equal age in-universe, though it's very hard not to think otherwise. One example is the case of Fateful Findings, where Neil's character reconnects with his childhood sweetheart, who's played by an actress clearly decades younger than Neil. I Am Here....Now takes this up to eleven by pairing a young woman in her 20s with a multi-''billion''-years-old Being, who is possibly ageless.
• Messianic Archetype: All of his protagonists are, increasingly with each new movie, presented, with varying levels of bluntness, as Jesus (minus the act of self-sacrifice). I Am Here....Now and Pass Thru in particular are about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face.
• Mind Screw: All his movies.
• Misplaced Wildlife: Twice, both times involving tigers. Pass Thru has Thgil popping into existence next to a tiger somewhere in the desert of Nevada, while Cade: The Tortured Crossing features Cade fighting a white tiger in a forest...somewhere in the American Midwest.
• Motifs: Broken laptops, strangely.
• No Endor Holocaust: In Pass Thru, 300 million people have been "eliminated" by Neil Breen's character, many of them high-ranking government and corporate officials ("The President" is the first one to vanish). The consequences of this are completely ignored. In fact, his character gives a speech telling people to rise up against corrupt governments and corporations despite the fact that he already had them all killed or made to "vanish."
• No Indoor Voice: Many of his characters have problems with volume control. These are usually criminals and/or antagonists, who supposedly shout at the top of their lungs all the time to assert their domination. Or at least, they try to shout, since most of the time, the actors just spoke really loudly instead of actually yelling. In instances where Neil's protagonists interact with these people, it's usually Ham-to-Ham Combat.
• Perpetual Frowner: Neil and his protagonists are very seldom seen smiling, and are comically deadpan, if not highly upset most of the time. During the rare moments where they do smile, it's always in a most stiff, forced and insincere manner.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: It doesn't matter if the characters he plays commit acts like genocide, Neil Breen has his movies make it clear that they're on the moral high ground and is not afraid to show it.
  • In Double Down, Aaron Brand/Neil finds it appropriate to contaminate Lake Mead with deadly anthrax just to test it out on some random fish. Granted, he does perform other morally-dubious acts throughout the film, but the poisoning goes one step above due to Lake Mead being one of the major fresh water reservoirs for three states^note Arizona, Nevada, and California and even a part of Mexico, that provides for some 20 million people and large areas of farmland. Clearly collateral damage is no big deal for him.
  • Dylan is less of an example of this in Fateful Findings, but he still cheats on his wife with Leah before he finds Emily dead from a self-inflicted overdose and doesn't appear to show much, if any, remorse for doing so.
  • In Pass Thru, Thgil "vanishes" 300 million people that he deems morally evil. Even if we argue that there is some justification in going after the truly irredeemable, we still see him get rid of two random security guards that were completely passive towards him, and two newscasters whose crime is that they work for a Strawman News Media (along with someone else who was unlucky to be in the same room as them). He also reveals in his big speech that Reality Television stars are also apparently deserving of this fate.
  • One especially disturbing scene in Twisted Pair has him creepily stalking an innocent woman to her home, break in in the middle of the night, and proceeds to assault and then Mind Rape her into falling in love with him. Need I remind you that his character is supposed to be the good guy? Apparently, the whole thing is supposedly a Bait-and-Switch, and the pair is actually roleplaying for whatever reason, but due to Neil's masterful writing, the viewer will likely not pick up on this at first blush, and be left with the impression that this supposed champion of righteousness just got away with doing a very heinous act without anyone calling him out on it.
• Random Events Plot: Neil's films are often very confusing to watch due to their tendency to veer off topic (if they even had one to begin with) into a jumbled mess of loose plot threads that either go nowhere, or have nothing significant to do with the story at large. I Am Here....Now and Fateful Findings are shining examples of this trope.
  • I Am Here....Now: Basically the entire subplot about Cindy, her baby, and the old man dying from cancer can be snipped off and the overarching plot would remain unchanged. While Cindy is one of the instigating elements that kicked off the main story arc, it ultimately fixated much more on her sister Amber instead, who is arguably the deuteragonist of the film aside from The Being, with Cindy very quickly fading out of focus after the old man was introduced. What ostensibly started as a seemingly-Benevolent Precursor coming down to Earth only to be disappointed at how mankind's greed had caused a lot of environmental damage and they don't seem to want to change, to a Physical God meddling with a few random people's lives and wiping out a local gang at the last minute, conveniently eliminating the corrupt politicians who were in cahoots with them, and then boomerangs right back during the ending, where The Being seems to suddenly realize why he came in the first place, and then leaves, having accomplished basically nothing.
  • Fateful Findings: Jim's entire family is just Filler, as they contribute little to nothing to the plot. Much of their (concerningly-lengthy) screentime is focused on them just doing nothing in particular, or fighting over petty issues that wouldn't warrant more than five minutes of talking to resolve. The car scene also has no knock-on effect since it doesn't affect Dylan's quest in any way, and outside of a short mention during the final act, nothing else comes of it. Also useless to the plot is their daughter Aly's weird flirty interactions with Dylan, since it comes literally out of nowhere and vanishes just as quickly.
• Replacement Goldfish: Dylan has absolutely no problem adjusting to his new lover in Fateful Findings, after his wife committed suicide by overdose. If anything, she was the real Replacement Goldfish, as he had been carrying a torch for Leah this entire time.
• Say My Name: "How could you have done this? JIM!"
• Sdrawkcab Name: In Pass Thru, not much effort is put to conceal the fact that "Thgil" is "light" spelled backwards.
• Self-Insert Fic: Neil Breen is the Copiously Credited Creator of his films, including being the protagonist of all of them.
• Shout-Out: Some of his films feature scenes lifted from other famous films. However, Breen's particular filmmaking style ensures that there's at least one glaring difference between the original scene and his take.
  • Fateful Findings has Neil's character being pursued by a teenage girl, and at one point they both more or less reenact the famous bikini scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the only difference being that the girl takes her top off with her back to the camera as opposed to in front of it. However, whereas in the original film both characters in the scene were teenagers, Neil was already approaching his early 60s, making for some Squick.
    The Cinema Snob: When in doubt, rip off an 80s movie. [later, while imitating Breen] "I've decided to write a script where everyone wants to fuck me. Nothing wrong with non-fiction!"
  • In Twisted Pair, Neil's character breaks into a woman's house and attacks her in an apparent attempt to rape her. Then it turns out that they're actually a couple role-playing. As mentioned elsewhere on this page, it appears to be a nod to a famous Bait-and-Switch scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Sundance forces Etta to perform a Shameful Strip before revealing that it's just a sex game. In this film, however, due to Neil's masterful writing, the viewer will likely not pick up on this at first blush (especially since the "lovers" go as far as getting into a violent fistfight) and be left with the impression that this supposed champion of righteousness just got away with doing a very heinous act.
• Show Within a Show: For whatever reason, parts of Pass Thru are played on a home theater screen near the end of Twisted Pair.
• Stock Footage: His films are often padded with stock footage of Las Vegas buildings and nightlife, the Nevada desert, swimming dolphins, the cosmos, and various CGI effects.
• Time Travel: His character in Pass Thru is apparently an AI from the future that somehow traveled back to present time to take over some random junkie's body, supposedly to cleanse the world of Corrupt Corporate Executives, politicians, evil governments, crime lords, and more. By the end of the movie, some 300 million people have been "vanished" by the protagonist, the ramifications of which are never touched upon. Somehow this radical alteration of the past does not lead to an Alternate Timeline.
• Techno Babble: It's quite apparent that Neil doesn't really understand the meaning of the big words he likes to incorporate into his scripts.
  • Perhaps the greatest misuse of a buzzword in his films is "humanoid" in Twisted Pair, which the unseen extra-terrestrials are mentioned to turn the protagonist and his brother into. Problem is, "humanoid", as the name implies, is used to describe something that has the appearance or resemblance of a human; as a human, you can't be anymore humanoid than you already are. Furthermore, it's an adjective used to physically describe a being, while Neil supposedly uses it to refer to his powers.
  • And then there's that part in Pass Thru where Thgil (poorly) explains the mechanics of time travelling, using an array of mostly tangentially-related notions and concepts that Neil likely heard from the Discovery Channel or something. And he also mispronounces some of them, such as pronouncing "quantum physics" as "quatum fisics."
• Touched by Vorlons: His protagonists are usually this, if they aren't already inexplicably divine or supernaturally-powerful, or are Vorlons themselves, as in the case of I Am Here....Now.
• Twin Threesome Fantasy: A pair of twin sisters are forced into prostitution in I Am Here....Now. They're not identical, but a lot of the male characters seem delighted nonetheless.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • Despite the establishing shot of his wife's death in Double Down showing that they're currently residing at a resort pool, nobody seems to notice the wife's assassination, Aaron covered in more blood than what leaked from her body in the first place, or both of them laying face down in the water. Nobody seems to care that they're both naked, despite the resort clearly being filled with people in swimsuits.
  • Because Breen apparently only had one stock image to hand for the greenscreened background of his character's big speech in the finale of Fateful Findings, it ends up making it look as though a mass suicide of corrupt politicians is taking place literally only a few feet away from his character, with neither he nor the assembled press considering it worthy of much attention.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Leah's fiancé in Fateful Findings just vanishes from the plot entirely after the barbecue scene and is never brought up again, with Leah eloping with Dylan afterwards.
  • The mental asylum group's driver in Cade: The Tortured Crossing just seemingly vanishes after running the car off the road. After the totaled vehicle was restored by Cade in a later scene, the car just speeds off with everyone in the backseats, even though no one was at the wheel, and the driver still unaccounted for.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: In Pass Thru, Thgil gives the elites at the party a chance to repent, but wipes out their security detail without a word.
• Younger Than They Look: All of Neil's protagonists are in their mid-to-late-30s (e.g. Dylan in Fateful Findings is specifically stated to be 38). He himself is obviously not, being in his late 40s while filming Double Down and during his 50s during most of his films (he was about to turn 55 at the time of making Fateful Findings), and doesn't even bother using makeup to hide that fact.

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"No more books!"