A gloriously ooey-gooey B-movie from writer-director Sam Walker, The Seed doesn’t kick into high gory gear until its second half. But when it does, it’s an unrelenting parade of ickiness that should quench the appetite of the average gross-out lover.
Heather (Sophie Vavasseur), Deidre aka D (Lucy Martin), and Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) have just arrived for a fun-in-the-sun girls’ weekend at Heather’s father’s super-sleek mansion in the barren flats of the Mojave Desert. The trio represents the typical archetypes of fictional girlfriends that, were it not for the fact that they are characters in a film, would never be such good friends with each other in real life. Heather is beautiful but approachable. D is drop-dead gorgeous (boy, does she know it) and bitchy. Charles, as everyone calls Charlotte, is, as D puts it, “geek-hot” but tomboyish. She is also the lone brunette in the group which means, of course, that Charles is the coolest and smartest of the bunch.
Heather, D, and Charles are looking forward to some rest and relaxation over the weekend. Especially D, who plans on using the supercool manse as a backdrop for some social media posts, which leads to some predictable commentary about today’s youth obsession with technology and apps. Not that it matters since soon after arriving in the desert, all three women experience cellular service disruption. In addition, the friends are anticipating the presence of a rare meteor shower that is predicted to occur late during their first evening at the house.
During the meteor shower, a mysterious thing crash lands into the pool, setting in motion a weekend that will forever change the lives of the three young women. What plummeted down is an oozing creature that wants to kill them all. This unexpected arrival also leads to the funniest line when D, observing the scatological stench emanating from the “thing,” remarks, “I think God took a s**t in your pool, Heather.”
Chelsea Edge as Charlotte – The Seed – Photo Credit: Shudder
“During the meteor shower, a mysterious thing crash lands into the pool…”
Flicks like The Seed exist to simply give their audiences some good old-fashioned gross-out body horror. Walker introduces eye candy such as an unbelievably chic desert house with porno flick ambiance and the hot, young women in bikinis. It should be noted that Charles, as the “brainy” one, wears a one-piece. However, she does get stoned, so she’s not totally square. This is to put audiences at ease before viscera sprays all over the place.
At about the halfway mark, Walker turns his attention to finding ever-escalating and ugly ways with which to rot out this eye candy, resulting in a reasonably fun hour and a half. It’s always amusing to watch vain characters, who put so much time and effort into constructing the perfect outward appearance, have their carefully curated looks ripped to shreds.
Martin, Edge, and Vavasseur each manage to develop as much as they can out of very one-dimensional roles. But this is a very thinly written movie, however well-produced and beautifully photographed (by Ben Brahem Ziryab) it might be. There is no discernable deeper meaning to The Seed, and that’s fine. Not every production needs to have a significant underlying context upon which to build a statement. Walker peppers his script with some pithy one-liners that keep the story from taking itself too seriously, thank goodness.
My only structural gripe comes at the end. The Seed could have culminated in a dynamite twist that no one saw coming but squanders the opportunity in favor of a more traditionally “satisfying” ending. What a shame because if Walker had just had a little more confidence in the narrative, he could have offered up one of the best twists to come along in a while. Alas, the previous 90 minutes is a perfectly entertaining B-movie shocker. Pretty people, pretty scenery, pretty disgusting.
"…pretty people, pretty scenery, pretty disgusting."
