Seed

There's very few films that have made me feel physically ill when the end credits roll. This sort of physical reaction is reserved for such films that are so powerful and uncompromising they drain me of emotion and cause me physical pain. I consider that an achievement for a film, and I tend to give films due credit for doing so. Funny Games (1997) and Irreversible (2002) are two films bestowed with such an achievement. I would like to add another film to that list, and that film is Seed.

Congratulations, Uwe Boll, your film made me physically sick after watching it.

You still suck as a director, and here's why.

Seed is a horror film about a serial killer in the late seventies in the United States. Caught after a series of grizzly murders, he is sentenced to death by electrocution. Having miraculously survived two electrocutions in a row, the prison warden fears that they will have to release him if he survives a third (a popular urban legend). They decide to bury him alive in a cemetery. Seed (the name of the killer) escapes and wreaks a path of revenge upon those who sentenced him to death.

This movie starts out surprisingly well. The dark, barely lit atmosphere hearkens back to the fear brought about in such classics as Alien or Halloween, where what you didn't see was just as important as what you did. The fear of the unknown and what lurks in the darkness can be a wonderful device. We see glimpses of Seed as he grabs his victims out of the darkness, and it's genuinely scary. Boll carries this for about 25 minutes before abandoning that concept completely. Shooting the villain from a wide angle in broad daylight may work for an action film, but it tanks a slasher film. Once Boll pulls the curtain away and exposes Seed as what he truly is, a man who looks like an overweight professional wrestler with a potato sack on his head, there's no more fear. This is one of the most basic concepts of horror cinema, and Boll misses the point completely.

In fact, this entire film is one missed point. Boll has been interviewed before as saying that to be a successful filmmaker, one has to be edgy. Whether it's a violent edge, a sexual edge, any sort of edge. You have to be edgy to get your name out there. Apparently, this means utilizing actual animal torture footage (obtained by PETA for the film) and having, most notably, a 10 minute shot of Seed torturing a woman to death with a hammer. I say woman, because frankly I have no idea who she was. It wasn't anyone I recognized from anywhere else in the film. Boll could have completely cut the scene out of the film, and the audience would have just chugged on oblivious to the missing scene (and would have been better off). This occurs with most of the deaths in the film. There's very little introduction into any of the "main" characters, and the protagonist's family only gets a few minutes of screen time. Why should we care if anything happens to them? If Boll's appealing to our basic human instincts then, sure, I don't want to see a little girl get tortured to death. But that's way too easy. Anyone can put a faceless puppy in front of an oncoming train, shoot it with a movie camera and proclaim, "See! You want this dog to live, but I will not do it! Ahaha, notice how I play with your emotions. I am such a skilled director!"

Why include such a disgusting and unsettling scenes in the film? Why include such obvious torture porn? I mentioned the two films, Funny Games and Irreversible, at the beginning of this review for a reason: both feature grisly scenes, both feature long unbearable takes. The difference between those two works of art and this rotting turd is that they're included with a purpose. Haneke indicts the audience in Funny Games, exposing us as just as guilty as the two kidnappers for having a lust for violence and entertainment. Boll may claim such, but to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, "if you gave him an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox." There's no deeper message here. There's no entertainment. No one is scared, no one is frightened. They're just disgusted. Anyone can set up a camera, torture someone to death, and then burn it onto a DVD. That doesn't make them a good filmmaker. Uwe Boll succeeded at failing to do anything but turn my stomach. Was that your intention? Great. I look forward to your next release of "Maggots and Shit" or something as equally vapid.