Seed (2006)

Yes, I did laugh about Uwe Boll's movies. I still think his adaptations of games are truly awful. But after seeing 'Seed' my laugh froze at my face.

Like most of the people who have reviewed the movie so far, I saw 'Seed' at London's FrightFest and I was really surprised by the work of Uwe. I have seen most of his films (including 'Amoklauf', which was not bad) and I must admit that he really improved as a director. He manages to keep the viewer interested from the very beginning and not because of PETA stuff, but because of the story - you get involved once you see the electric chair execution. This is really not what Uwe has used us to see in his movies.

'Seed' is a gloomy horror movie, a nasty piece of work by the director who unleashes his anger which has been boiling within him for some time now. Uwe said that he wanted to put all his negative emotions into the celluloid. And you can clearly see it on the screen. It is of course quite metaphoric, because Seed – the main character of the movie – seems to me as an alter ego of the director. Everybody wants him dead and buried, but he manages to escape from death's embrace and takes his revenge. This is what Uwe would like to do to all these guys who do not even bother to watch his movies and just put 1 star at IMDb. That is why this dark, brutal and nihilistic tale with some really gruesome scenes is so credible and sincere. And you may not believe it, but some of the viewers went out of the cinema and not because it was a ridiculous crap, but because of the shocking value of the movie. The scene when Seed is hitting a woman on the head with a hammer was really harsh and hard to watch (although you can see some CGI effects were added), not to mention that it reminded me of that infamous fire extinguisher scene from notorious "Irreversible" by Gaspar Noe. But this was Uwe Boll movie, remember? I do not recall anyone laughing at that time though.

Apart from its nasty content 'Seed' provides some dark atmosphere and tension, especially in a scene where cops are searching the house looking for the murderer in pitch blackness. And you will surely not forget the ending, which was quite a surprise for me. Of course the movie has it flaws: a couple of pointless scenes, lousy dialogue, mediocre acting, but most of the time it is really interesting.

Uwe is learning from his mistakes, trying to improve his skills and make movies he wants, while all the people around the world do not want him to continue with that, filling Internet with all that mockery, insults, hatred. A very high price for him to be paid for his passion. With 'Seed' he proves that he can make a good horror movie. That is why he deserves more respect than all these pathetic brainless punks who can only click the keyboard and judge his movies not even making an attempt to see them.

Normally I would give Uwe 7/10 stars for the movie. An extra star would go for answering one of the guys at FrightFest who did not like the movie because it was too shocking for him, he did not enjoy it and apparently wanted to vent his anger on the director. It went like that: 'It is a horror movie, what did you expect? If you don't like it, good luck with >>Night at the Museum<< with Ben Stiller'. Now, that was one hell of a good answer! But I will give 10 stars as a sign of a protest against all these 1 star ratings – 99% of them were put before the festival release.

While not a masterpiece by any

Fmovies: Over the past year, Uwe Boll has shown marginal improvement as a filmmaker, cranking out the competent "In the Name of the King" (a "Lord of the Rings" clone) and the proudly vulgar, post-9/11 satire "Postal." But then came "Seed," and the counter was reset to Zero, keeping his bid for legitimacy and respect that much further out of reach. And I'm a fan of the guy–his films exhibit a uniquely screwball vision, and are never dull.

Spawned from his frustration over the savage notices his early films received, "Seed" is a colossally misguided attempt at social commentary, and an even worse jab at creating an iconic slasher mythology (Boll often seems to be taking a page from Rob Zombie's successful reboot of "Halloween"). The antagonist is Maxwell Seed (Will Sanderson), a mute, hulking brute who's slain 666 people and sits on death row, awaiting execution; after unsuccessfully frying the beast, he rises from the grave to seek revenge on those who put him there...and so begins a string of wholly gratuitous mayhem.

Trying to create a new-millennium slasher in the vein of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, Max Seed is too nondescript and boring to leave an impression, ultimately resembling a washed-up pro wrestler doing "The Toolbox Murders" on a succession of equally boring victims. Furthermore, Seed's character and Boll's "message" run contrary to one another: the death penalty is wrong, sure, but are we really expected to sympathize with a soulless killer who's left a couple hundred corpses in his wake? I think not.

Meanwhile, Michael Pare acts like a listless, long-lost brother to James Remar's character on "Dexter": a cop who sits at his desk a lot, thumbing through newspaper clippings, and watching pointless stop-motion scenes of decomposing animals and people trapped in Seed's lair. By the time he and a bunch of cardboard cops storm Seed's hideout, the sequence is so drawn-out, ill-conceived (the lighting is almost non-existent), and unexciting (despite a healthy dose of gore) that it almost put me to sleep.

The shoddy film-making isn't limited to just that sequence: "Seed" appears to have been shot by a drunken cinematographer, since the camera bobs and weaves endlessly, a technique that's more stomach-turning than the gore itself; these protracted takes of very little happening only draw attention to the meandering, almost non-existent narrative. At 90 minutes, the film is distended enough to be considered a form of torture, which might have been Boll's intent all along.

Pure genius...I guess the joke's on me.

For any other movie it would be alright but I think what he was going for here is to disturb people... House of the Dead was a mess, Alone in the Dark never made any sense.. And I skipped out on Bloodrayne because of all the horrible reviews... Well I came across this one at wal-mart and I watched it with low expectations... Don't get me wrong the first half tends to really drag out giving incoherent backstory telling... Making it seem like a prequel to another movie or something... But once it got into gore mode it delivered... There are many visceral scenes in this movie that made me cringe and it had an ending that was well executed... It did drag a lot though but for a boll movie it's an 8 for a regular movie its a 5 A lot more disturbing than hostel was supposed to be...

Seed fmovies. Consider for a moment what it must be like to be Uwe Boll. Somewhere, perhaps in those places that Jack Nicholson said 'you don't talk about at parties', Boll knows that David Lean had head lice as a child that had more talent for film making than him. Gore Whores, metal-heads and the socially dysfunctional may bump into him on the circuit and tell him otherwise but general audiences find the Teutonic helmsman's output so bereft of originality, wit or imagination that he's become the internet's bogeyman – an online discursive synonym for photochemical excrement. Boll does his best to ride over these naysayers, exploiting tax credits available in Germany and Canada to keep working and raising money from a network of dentists as Zero Mostel did with old ladies in The Producers. The difference being that Mostel's character knew he was making bowel fill. Maybe Uwe knows it too.

Such is the level of hostility toward each new 'Bollbuster' that IMDb patrons sabotage their ratings by voting 1 before they've seen it. Boll's attempts at silencing his critics by challenging them to a boxing match and knocking them out just made them more determined. Indeed he's probably the only filmmaker that's boosted thesaurus sales as critics search for inventive ways of describing garbage.

This onslaught has made Uwe a very thick skinned man, so much so that he must feel like he's wrapped in a carpet, but one who feels as if he's bullied by the entire world. Like most people in that situation he lashes out, determined to upset as many people as possible with the memory of a tearful evening holding Variety's review of House of the Dead, never too far from the surface. This 'I know you are but what am I' strategy for reclaiming the initiative produced the blunt satire of Postal, which attempted to napalm the dissenters with jokes about 9/11, Christian fundamentalism, Jihad, Nazism and paedophilia. Such a litany of invective requires a satirist with the mind of Peter Cook and the visual imagination of Chris Morris but the closest Boll gets to either man is the o in their surname.

In Seed, shot back to back with the aforementioned game adaptation, Boll is back with a story about a sadistic serial murderer (is there any other kind?) who gets the chair only for two attempts to fail in permanently curtailing all signs of life. Mindful of the fictional law that says anyone still alive after 3 attempts must go free, though if you'd been fried with that much electricity why would you want to, they pronounce him legally dead and bury him, only for the disgruntled killer to resurface and begin a whirlwind tour of his gaolers.

Boll begins his 'exploration of nihilistic rage' with Seed watching footage of animals being tortured for experimental purposes. From there we're treated to the killer's stock in trade – kidnapping dogs, babies and grown women and allowing them to starve to death on camera only to become maggot food. We're invited to reflect on what a depraved race of amoral meat sacks we all are – our inhumanity to each other and our fellow creatures acting as a lighting rod that acts as a catalyst for the most disgusting vestiges of the human condition. Yes, we're worthless, gormless sadists and worse than that, we won't give Uwe a good rating on the IMDb. In short, humanity is bunk.

Of course you might think that Uwe relies on our worst excesses for his livelihood and with that in mind it's a bit of a bipola

Director Uwe Boll is commonly regarded as a terrible film-maker, and his sick psycho killer flick Seed is unlikely to radically alter this general perception, being an absolute mess in the script department; however, if nothing else, it does prove that Boll has balls.

Packed full of sadistic, no-holds-barred violence, the film is truly nasty stuff from start to finish, the director clearly not intending to make any new friends; as a result, I can't help but feel a sneaking admiration for this movie maverick, a man for whom the words 'quit', 'diplomacy' and 'restraint' obviously do not exist.

During the opening credits, Boll even has the nerve to show PETA footage depicting real-life atrocities perpetrated on defenceless animals; I can only guess that this was an attempt to show the viewer just how inhumane people can be, but it comes across as a cheap tactic to shock the audience.

Thankfully, everything from here on in is achieved through special effects, although with numerous graphic murders, a baby among the many victims, it's still definitely not for the easily offended. A prolonged hatchet attack on an elderly woman is perhaps the film's most nauseating moment (although as this particular spot of carnage escalates, the somewhat iffy CGI makes it slightly less effective).

Yes, Boll sure knows how to upset and disturb; all he needs to do now is perfect telling a decent story (one that isn't so obviously flawed), hire a decent lighting technician (some scenes were way too dark), and he might be able to silence his critics without having to punch their lights out.

4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.

Aside from the movie having some longer cuts/scenes, overall it was a pretty solid horror flick.

Acting was not spectacular and neither was the script (kind of reminded me of Shocker), but it was a decent movie. The lead police offer in the film did a fairly good job of showing range of emotion depending on the scene/situation. Personally I am a fan of the silent, demented killer. Not a single line spoken that the viewer can hear by Seed himself. Probably not a bad idea because I'm going to go out on a limb and say the guy in the mask is probably a brutal actor...

Additionally, there is enough splatter to appease any horror fan and a nice little ending that doesn't leave you feeling warm and fuzzy inside.

I know Uwe Boll is known for making ridiculous films, but he came through with one here. A pleasant surprise.