Reviewed by Rhianna Pratchett
Stars Michael Paré, Will Sanderson, Ralf Moeller, Jodelle Ferland, Thea Gill | Written by Uwe Boll
UK certification 18 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 85 minutes | Directed by Uwe Boll
I’ll say one thing for Seed, Uwe Boll’s latest horror film: I felt ill within the first minute. Truly an impressive feat. This wasn’t because of the main content of the film itself, but because Boll chooses to show old, but very real, footage of some of the terrible atrocities perpetrated at fur farms. In truth, Boll does give a warning beforehand. He’s apparently showing it as a "statement on humanity". But why this genuinely disturbing and sickening footage was deemed appropriate to be tagged onto the start of an exceptionally dumb horror movie about a non-speaking, masked serial killer is baffling. It’s like having footage of sweat shops before 27 Dresses.
So it goes like this. Max Seed is a serial killer who has killed 666 (oh yes!) people before he gets caught. This is despite the fact that this lumbering mute dispatches victims with the subtly of an iceberg to the frontal lobe. This is illustrated in a scene where he bashes a woman’s head in with a mallet for literally five minutes, until her brains are painting the walls like an explosion in a jam factory.
Seed is sentenced to death by electric chair, but fails to die even on the third pull of the switch. By some kind of weird law this means that he should be set free. But the police, reluctant to release Seed back into the community, decide to cover up this fact by burying him alive. Where upon he promptly digs his way out and takes revenge on those who were stupid enough not to kill him in the first place. In truth the acting is slightly better than in Bloodrayne so it’s not a full-out assault on the ears. There are good people in there like Jodelle Ferland whose capacity to embrace the weird (Tidelands, Silent Hill) at such a young age is admirable. But even she should have standards. The script is poor, the direction is hammy and even though the cinematography is not too bad, it falls into some of the worst horror pitfalls and clichés.
I’m really not a vehement Boll hater, despite hailing from the games industry which Boll regularly and embarrassingly pillages from. I like the fact that he gets out there and tries his hand at everything with a childlike exuberance that far outweighs his talent (although, scarily enough, Postal looks like it could actually be genuinely amusing). There’s been some chatter online that Boll is “getting better” and Seed in some kind of indication of that. But this is really only in terms of a hyperactive puppy is getting better when it craps on your wood floor instead of on your new Persian rug. Whichever way you look at it, it’s still crap.
EXTRAS * Just the trailer, and a behind the scenes featurette.