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DIRECTED BY: Sam Walker
FEATURING: Chelsea Edge, Lucy Martin, Sophie Vavasseur
PLOT: Three young women spend a weekend in a remote home for a photo shoot, but their plans are interrupted when a meteor shower delivers an alien.
COMMENTS:
- Deidre: vapid; (conventionally) smokin’ hot; internet influencer.
- Charlotte: geek-nerd; works at a pet store; has an old phone.
- Heather: required because her father owns the remote house the three women are stranded in.
There are three other (human) characters, but here’s the thing: I’m talking about a low-budget science-fiction/horror thingy that is the kind of story horror filmmakers have been re-tooling since… (research pending). Gosh, if only I had Charlotte around to help me here—writer/director Sam Walker makes it obvious she reads books and knows things. Also made obvious is the fact that wherever these three pals are spending the weekend has no phone reception, or wi/fi, or even a land-line. (This last fact was deftly established by Charlotte’s line, “People don’t have land-lines any more”; this is patently a falsehood, as I assure you that I myself have a landline.)
The Seed spends the better part of an hour establishing their remoteness, their vehicleless-ness (though this assertion is later undermined), and the stinkiness of whatever it was that falls from the sky during a “once in a lifetime meteor shower.” I watched in vague impatience as the characters’ personalities were dictated, molded, established, reinforced, and etched in carbonite. An hour goes by, the vapid one vapids, the daughter of the homeowner freaks out about damaging the place, and the geek-nerd spares the life of a space entity and, in the one thing that kept me hopeful in the opening two-thirds, has an odd kiss with the odd boy who comes around to tend the lawn.
This capering, however, finally becomes interesting in the closing act. Elements from Eraserhead, and even Society, creep into the action. When Charlotte brings in the stinky baby-alien, its look and its swaddling (and its intermittent screeching) bring to mind Henry’s ordeal with the evil duck-fetus. And when Deidre attempts to kill the whats-it while Heather and Charlotte go off in the “buggy,” she instead partakes in something with a… shunting kind of look. And oh yes, there’s a bit of an Edward Blake-meets-2001: A Space Odyssey scene (with boobies). The final half hour ultimately makes The Seed worth watching, as the over-long opening setup allows a new personality for the two least interesting characters. Even Heather succumbs to the strange wiles of the alien entity and, in a stroke that emphasizes just how tedious she is as a person, transmogrifies into an unsettling facsimile of a chill young person.
This damning with faint praise (or, not even that I suppose) may suggest that I am not happy to have spent my time in this odd world of privilege, swish housing, and Chekhov’s mace. Somehow I was smiling by the end, even through the requisite “Oh-ho, you thought the problem may have been addressed, but you were wrong!” final shot. The Seed is effective B-movie fare, with sun-shiny pool scenes, fun creature effects, and just enough suspense in the finale to have me talking back to the television screen.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
