“I wanted to make a horror movie that was no fun…” noted writer/director Uwe Boll of this nihilistic companion piece to POSTAL. Although the films couldn’t be more different tonally, they were shot back to back with much of the same cast and crew, and both films share a despairing world view, even though they unfold in different time periods.
Boll has made a relentlessly downbeat take on the serial killer / slasher genre, punctuated by gruesome deaths that make you wince rather than cheer. Visually the key influence is clearly SE7EN : like that film, SEED is drenched in flash lit darkness and torrential rain, until the finale when – again, parallel to the Fincher film – its grimmest moments occur within an extended scene of daylight. The unflinching, sadistic violence, however, is more akin to hard-edged 80’s fare like MANIAC than the consistently inexplicit SE7EN.
SEED heralds the welcome return to the screen of Michael Pare (featured in POSTAL in a much smaller role) as the cop-protagonist. The story is set in 1979, so that the characters cant fall back on the technology that has to be considered anytime anyone makes a psycho-killer movie these days (hurray for the lack of a “there’s no signal!” mobile moment and the absence of internet-research montages!). Pare succeeds in capturing a serial killer named Max Seed (Will Sanderson), who was disfigured and emotionally wrecked by a childhood incident and has grown up to be unrepentantly evil, notching up 666 (!) kills in a few years. Seed is sentenced to an electric chair execution but survives three consecutive attempts to fry him. Under state law (really just an enduring urban legend the film takes as fact), he must be set free if such a scenario occurs. The prison wardens, executioner and Pare conspire to bury him alive in the jail grounds, but Seed bursts out of his premature tomb and persecutes the families of the men.
SEED’s influences are obvious and varied. As aforementioned, the cinematography shuns natural light to match the oppressive darkness of the script, a la SE7EN, while the intense mood is heightened by the ominous presence of Jessica De Rhooij’s gloomy score, which echoes the work of Howard Shore on both SE7EN and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. The recent success of mean spirited physical/mental torture-based films like SAW and HOSTEL impacts on this film’s nastier moments, though Boll has dismissed HOSTEL in interviews, referring to it disparagingly as “AMERICAN PIE in Eastern Europe”. The basic set-up of the movie recalls genre flicks as old as SHOCKER and all those movies in which notorious killers somehow survive multiple execution attempts to resume their murder spree.
As derivative as it is, this winds up a surprisingly accomplished and powerful movie in its own right. It is destined to face as much of a barrage of vitriol and critical bile as POSTAL and, indeed, (for different reasons), everything Boll makes. Although thematically, SEED is on safer, generic ground than POSTAL, it is guaranteed to irk many potential viewers from the very beginning. Those who dismiss Boll’s newest movies as reliant on shock tactics will find further ammunition in Boll’s decision to open SEED with a “Warning” title card, the kind of self-promoting come-on that wouldn’t be out of place in a 70’s grind house pic.
What follows forms an unsubtle attempt to reinforce the film’s overall “humanity sucks” message via the use of real, hard-to-watch animal cruelty footage. In truth, its tough to defend Boll’s use of genuine PETA footage at the outset of the movie. The film is about man’s barbaric inhumanity to man, and the harrowing images of man’s callous actions against animals packs a forceful punch, as was intended. But, while this reviewer doesn’t think the use of the animal-snuff videos is totally out of place, SEED would achieve its impact with this initial sequence excised, no question.
The rest of the movie offers an impressively bleak combination of joyless police procedural thriller and nasty slasher movie, with Sanderson a formidable, silent masked figure of fear and among the most sinister faceless-killers of recent vintage. Boll’s direction of the kills and the scares reveal a hitherto untapped talent for suspense and staging violence : a flash lit set piece in the killer’s lair is especially atmospheric and the old killer-under-the-bed jolt familiar from 1001 slasher flicks works a treat here.
The violence is unremittingly brutal and in keeping with the sour tone. A dream sequence shows a baby being bludgeoned (kids don’t come off well in POSTAL either), while eyes, heads and lips are perforated, crushed and bitten with sadistic glee. The film’s most extreme sequence – the cause of disgust, walk-outs and arguably nervous laughter at its London premiere in August – almost feels like a self-contained mini-movie in its own right : one long, unflinching take of a previously unseen bound woman being pummeled.
While HOSTEL and its peers favor cutaways and lightning-fast editing in their gore scenes, Boll refuses to let the audience relax in this sequence as Seed initially toys with the woman by playfully hitting her on the head with a hammer (shades of the uncomfortably funny Grandpa/mallet scene in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE) before rage takes over and he obliterates her head with countless blows rendering her unrecognizable as a person. At a certain point, through necessity, some distinctly dodgy CGI takes over to depict the bludgeoning in its final stages – this is distracting, but can’t numb the impact of a truly striking, provocative exercise in audience endurance that practically screams : “Why are you still watching this?”, Like the animal cruelty footage at the very beginning, this scene is set to be a talking point for a long time to come.
The movie’s biggest achievement is its refusal to cop out or pander to mainstream standards. Boll follows through on his promise by giving SEED a suitably mean-spirited conclusion that offers no respite from the horrors we have witnessed, just more gruelling death and suffering.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
