About 30 seconds into the Uwe Boll written, produced and directed Seed, I almost turned the movie. Not because of Boll's not-so-great reputation as a director or my previous experience with two of his movies that I didn't like (House of the Dead and BloodRayne), but because the opening involves videos of animal cruelty. And not just someone hitting a dog, but beating them to death. It's gross and I has to fast forward past it.
Past that, I actually enjoyed Seed, much to my surprise. And that's after a fairly confusing first half hour as we get concurrent stories of Seed in jail and also our cop hero capturing Seed. It's a flashback, but I didn't quite catch onto that at first. Oh, also, the story revolves around a law that flashes on the screen at the very beginning that basically says that if you try to kill someone in the electric chair three times and it doesn't kill them, they get to walk free. Now, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why would you let a mostly indestructible mass murderer (one newspaper clipping we see says that he killed the laughable number of 666 people in 6 years, which averages out to about 3-4 a day!) out after your method of killing him proves ineffective? But, hey, maybe it's a real law, I dunno.
Oh, one more quick thing that bugged me. The movie's set in 1979, yet this hillbilly killer has access to a camcorder. I'm pretty sure that was a really, really expensive piece of equipment back then. It's possible he stole it from one of his victims, but then later on he sets up two camcorders, connected to two VCRs and two TVs networked in his house. Maybe he's one of those idiot savants, but it just feels a bit shakey.
Okay, enough complaining. This was a very effective horror movie. There was even one point where Boll made me jump and that takes some doing. At it's core, Seed is about a killer getting revenge on the people who tried to kill him for killing so many other people. For the most part, the death scenes are pretty great and tend to avoid the cliche's you'd expect (I kept waiting for Seed to be waiting for his victims behind an opened door, but no go). There's one human torture scene that started off as uncomfortable and turned into a strange video game-like sequence.
And man oh man, what an ending. I'm not going to say anything about it because I don't want to give anything away, but it really flipped the script on what you'd expect. Even with all my nitpicks above, it's worth the 86 minutes or so it took to watch (especially with skipping through the animal abuse stuff). I feel like people like to pile up on Boll, it's kind of the popular thing to do, but, in my experience only 33% of his movies were actually enjoyable.
Also enjoyable was Richard Gale's short horror film Criticized which is about a horror director who kidnaps and tortures the critic who savaged his movie. Good, creepy stuff, definitely worth a viewing.
Oh, one last Seed related complaint. But this one has nothing to do with the movie itself, but the DVD. Like The Zombie Diaries, the DVD box has almost nothing to do with the movie. I was shocked (no electric chair pun intended) that the girl in the red dress doesn't even appear in the movie, though the electric chair does. Why wouldn't they show the awesome masked killer in one form or another on the box? Hey what do I know? I've never even heard of Vivendi before. Oh well. You can see the cool poster above and the DVD box below.
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