Fateful Findings (2014)

Certain movies catch the attention of general audiences.  Most of the time these are the action movies of the summer, but there are also the good and bad movies that come out at other times of the year.  For the sake of this blog, I’m going to focus on the bad side of the scale.  A few times a year, a movie comes out that is so bad that I need to watch it.  It’s not one of the obvious movies like this year’s Pixels where people just heap loads of critical hate upon it.  I’m talking about the ones that start with a quiet rumbling of how bad they are.  The lesser movies that gain a cult following before exploding into the popular cultural mind.  Movies like A Talking Cat!?! or The Room.  These are movies that people didn’t know about at first.  They gained traction and became infamous for their being bad.

One of the ones that has come to my attention since its release in 2013 is Fateful Findings, directed by, written by, and starring Neil Breen.  If you haven’t heard about it, that’s okay.  This entire post is going to be dedicated to letting you know what the movie is all about.  Neil Breen is a director of low budget features, typically the kind that get buried to never be seen by anyone but the hardcore fans of that kind of thing.  His two other films, Double Down and I Am Here… Now aren’t too well known outside of the cult festival circuit and the bottom of the Netflix library.  The movies have been funded by Breen himself, using money that he has made in his day job as an architect.

Fateful Findings is a movie that fits multiple genres without really fitting any genre.  It has overly dramatic moments, a conspiracy angle, supernatural elements, and romance.  Neil Breen tried to make this movie relatable to everyone while actually making it relatable to nobody.  One of the biggest factors in making the movie feel like a jumbled mess is the uninteresting stories that trample all over each other.  I want to use this post to describe the many storylines so that you might better understand the issues that this movie has.

Regeneration

Early in the movie, Neil Breen’s character finds some “buried treasure” as a child.  It’s not really buried treasure though.  It’s a mushroom that turns into a small box.  In the box, he finds a black stone.  For the rest of his life, he has this black stone with him.

Fateful Findings quickly jumps forward to an adult Neil Breen being hit by a car.  As he lays dying in the street, he clutches the black stone in his hand.  The black stone keeps him alive and magically heals all of his wounds.  After he is healed and back home, the regeneration is never really a focus of the movie again.  It is something that happened, and that’s it.

Pills

I probably should have noticed this storyline in Fateful Findings coming into play far sooner than it did.  The story is a domestic story between Neil Breen and his movie wife, in which she is addicted to the painkillers that he has received for his injuries.  It seemed to come out of nowhere.  At one point he’s using the painkillers, then he decides he doesn’t need them anymore and she starts complaining about needing them for herself.

It was an odd moment in Fateful Findings when I realized that addiction was going to play a part in the story.  Neil Breen’s character is doing his writing thing and his significant other asks if he has taken his meds.  He says he doesn’t need them and dumps them in the toilet, without flushing.  She then takes them out of the toilet.  I thought that she was taking them out so that he would eventually take them, but I later found out she took them out for her own addiction and she wanted him to stay on the painkillers so that she could have them.

This storyline was a weird addition to the movie because it was meant to cause a rift between the seemingly happy couple.  With some of the later stuff that happens in the movie, this story was completely unnecessary.

The Other Couple

While Neil Breen is in the hospital, we are introduced to the other major couple in the movie.  These other two people, along with the daughter of the woman, are even more domestically troubled than Neil Breen and his lady.  They even get to the point of violence.  They throw things at each other, yell, and use weapons.  It all comes down to the man treating the woman poorly because she doesn’t have sex with him as much as he would like.  In the end, they don’t fit together well and end up paying greatly for it.

The Other Couple’s Daughter

The two people have a daughter.  Actually, I think she’s the woman’s daughter, and the abusive husband is just a stepfather.  She watches everything that goes on with the couple.  She hears the yelling, sees the fighting, and witnesses the violence that it comes to.  She is the product of a broken home.

It only seems fitting that her parental issues would cause her to do some crazy things.  She’s a teenage girl, and she’s sneaking into Neil Breen’s home to swim naked in his pool and shower herself in his washroom.  Of course it freaks Neil Breen out.  It’s weird.  She is a terribly written character that didn’t need to be in the movie at all.

The Secrets

We discover partway through Fateful Findings that Neil Breen isn’t actually writing the novel that he’s been talking about writing.  Instead, he is hacking into government websites and finding all of the dirty secrets that he can find and share with people.  He is going to expose the underbelly and take down all of the bad people in the USA.  There isn’t much more to say about that part of the movie.  It seems really out of place in a movie that has been mostly about relationships and the drama within them.

The Romance

Fateful Findings begins with a scene showing Neil Breen as a child having the best summer of his life with a girl that would move away soon after.  His narration said that he would never see her again, but that wasn’t entirely true.  When he fell victim to a car accident, she would be one of the doctors that took a look at his injuries.  They rekindled their romance when he discovered who she was.

The romance between these two characters could have been the sole story of the movie, and the movie probably would have been better for it.  Forget the pills causing a rift between Breen and (what I assume is) his wife.  Instead, they get torn apart by the love that he has for this childhood crush.  It would have been more compelling and made more sense in terms of story.  Make this part the focus and forget about all the other drama in the movie.

As a whole, the stories all feel fairly separate from one another.  Fateful Findings seemed like a bunch of different ideas that Neil Breen had, tossed together because he just wanted to get them out there.  He would rather have the movie out there in a rough form than take the time to harness his ideas.  They’re too important to sit on.  It hurts the movie.

There are ideas in Fateful Findings that could have made for great movies.  The mixture of them created a mess of a movie that isn’t enjoyable to watch.  I’m interested to see the other movies that Neil Breen has made, but I’m not interested in revisiting this one.  Once was enough for me.  It’s easy enough to see how this ended up gaining the kind of cult following that other bad movies seem to get.  It’s terrible.

There’s still a little bit more to this post, however.  The notes:

• Fateful Findings was suggested to me by @robtrench.
• Early in the post, I mentioned two other Sunday “Bad” Movies.  They are The Room and A Talking Cat!?!
• Have you seen Fateful Findings, or any of the other Neil Breen movies?  What did you think of them?  Talk about this movie, this post, or anything related to them in the comments below.
• The comments section can also be used for suggesting future movies for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I’m always looking for movies that I can potentially watch for this blog.  If you want to suggest to me on Twitter, that’s fine too.
• Next week’s movie is Delgo, a movie with one of the worst box office openings ever.  It is second only to The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (for movies opening on 2000+ screens), which I have already covered for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’ll tell you all about Delgo next week.