Seed (DVD)
Johnny Butane
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Reviewed by Johnny Butane
Starring Michael Pare, Will Sanderson, Ralf Moeller, Jodelle Ferland
Directed by Uwe Boll
Released by Vivendi Entertainment
We’ve been hearing about this one for almost 2 years now, it was made just a few days after Boll finished Postal, and the entire time we’ve heard how intense and horrific it is. With that in mind, you’re going to go into a Uwe Boll movie with low expectations from the outset, but no depth of expectations could prepare you for Seed. Yes, it’s that bad.
Michael Pare stars as Detective Matt Bishop, assigned to track down and eliminate Max Seed (Sanderson), a notorious serial killer who managed to rack up 666 murders in 6 years, between 1973 and 1979. As the film starts we learn that the electric chair being used in Seed’s prison isn’t exactly top of the line (foreshadowing, anyone?) but Seed has to be executed as soon as possible, so they have to move forward.
Then we’re taken back in time to Seed’s capture, a 20-minute long scene of guys walking around in the dark right at the beginning of the film that manages to slow it down from the outset. It doesn’t help that the timeline isn’t identified and even during the beginning of the Seed siege is still jumping back and forth between the cops tracking them down and cops watching videos Seed made of animals he left to rot in a jail cell.
Ah, the videos. Seems Seed was trying to make the point that life starts as nothing and ends in nothing, so he videotapes bugs, dogs, babies and grown humans as they slowly starve to death then rot away to nothing. Oh, it’s fun for the whole family let me tell you.
I get what Boll was trying to do with these scenes but it just doesn’t work in the context of Seed, mainly because Seed has no context. It’s jumping around in time too much, slowing down when it should be moving along quickly and basically just being a big mess.
So after the protracted (and I mean protracted) scene of Seed’s capture, we’re finally taken back to his execution, which, as I’m sure you’re aware, doesn’t work. The state, which is never specified, has a law on the books that if they run you through the chair three times and you don’t die, you get to go free. Not that there’d be much left of you to appreciate it if you did. Luckily for Seed there’s not much there to begin with, so once he digs himself out of the ground he’s right back to where he was before.
A revenge trip, including yet another overlong scene of Seed slowing killing a woman with a hammer (or, as Uncle Creepy called it, Epic Hammering) but nothing that’s really in the least bit interesting.
The whole movie is so damn depressing, which Boll’s said from the getgo was the intention, that the ending shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise. The final confrontation between Seed and Bishop is the most interesting part of the entire film, aside from one really good effect of a head getting kicked through jail cell bars, but that’s not saying a whole helluva lot.
I was really hoping for more from Seed, especially since I genuinely enjoyed Postal and I’ve heard that Tunnel Rats is actually worth my ocular juices, but it was not meant to be. My hope is that Seed will be the last bad film Boll will make in his career and it’s all uphill from here. Man’s gotta dream, right?
All right, onto the DVD; the primary feature is a feature-length commentary by Boll, which is surprisingly sporadic for a man who I’ve personally heard talk for almost an hour straight with nary a breath. I think his longest speeches are about the death penalty and the PETA footage he got to use. For the former he goes on for the entire Seed execution scene about why the death penalty is wrong, and I admit he has some valid points. With the latter he explains how he came about working with them and it’s pretty interesting, as well. A shame that PETA finally aggress to have something to do with a horror movie and it’s such a bad one, though.
There’s a six-minute making of featurette that consists solely of someone with a handheld camera filming the setup for the See execution scene. Kind of dull unless you’ve always wondered how Boll directs. There are also some deleted scenes, mainly extended scenes with day-by-day intertitles of the animals rotting away in their prison cell, and the Seed trailer.
A non-Seed related feature is “Criticized”, a short film by Richard Gale that documents the lengths an indie horror filmmaker will go to get back at the respected critic who slammed the only public screening of his film, essentially killing it. Of course we all know how unrealistic that is, since usually the worse a film is reviewed the more people want to see it, but it’s still pretty entertaining considering it mainly takes place in a bathtub.
Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to play Advent Rising, the video game that comes with the DVD, so I have no idea why it’s included.
It really doesn’t matter what I say or don’t say about Seed; its fanbase is built-in already. There’s not going to be many out there who will pick it up based on word-of-mouth because I can’t see people saying much about it save for how dull it is, but consider yourself warned if you’re curious about checking this one out. It should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway; avoid Uwe Boll’s Seed.
Special Features
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2 out of 5
Special Features
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2 1/2 out of 5
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