Rent Breadcrumbs (2011)

Spoilers follow ... - Breadcrumbs review by NP

‘BreadCrumbs’ seems to be the baby of actor/producer/writer Mike Nichols. He plays big bad Eddie, who is in charge of a trip to an isolated building where he is shooting a porn film. He’s a boorish bully, and the ‘porn’ angle seems just a reason for some mild sex and nudity.

Conversely, Dom (Douglas Nyback) is quite funny, therefore it’s a shame – although not a huge surprise – that he is one of the first victims of Patti and Henry (Dan Shaked and Amy Crowdis). These two Hansel and Gretel wannabes have no back-story, and there is no explanation as to how they live out here in the remote woodlands and look so healthy and clean, or why they live the way they do, and why they enjoy killing people.

Veteran porn starlet Angie Hart (Marianne Hagan) mentions at one point she may like to have children, and this indicates somehow she has a kind of maternal instinct with the two ‘kidults’. I use this description because despite all the defensive cries of ‘she’s just a kid’, or ‘they’re just children’, the two are clearly approaching their twenties. Equally, the brother and sister sometimes refer to Hart as their mother, but nothing more is made of this. Hart is a good character and well-played, but her decision to sympathise with Patti against the will of her associates is exactly the kind of naivety (or stupidity) horror films have thrived on for years – and it always annoys!

This is clearly a low-budget venture, and some will attack it purely for that reason: the acting isn’t always entirely convincing and the effects are sparse. And yet, I really enjoyed ‘BreadCrumbs’. The story is silly if you examine it beyond superficially, but the deliberate avoidance of explanation leaves us to speculate how Patti and Henry came to be the way they are. Also, the question raised a few times is – why don’t the characters simply physically overpower the two killers at some point?

There is good use of location, and the character of ‘the Woodman’ is a good red herring. In the somewhat open-ending, it is possible he saves the day, but the fact that the film ends almost mid-scene leaves us guessing. My score is 7 out of 10.