The Seekers

How the movie was made: Several individuals escaped from a locked ward at the Center for Control of Compulsive Overeating in Corvallis, Oregon. They soon began shooting an amateur horror movie about a demon possessed video tape that causes those exposed to it to either commit murder or dress in a holloween devil costume and paste Doritos to their body. Some even decided to take off their clothes and pose naked for the camera though they should have had the good sense to keep their clothes on. How in the world did this ever make it to DVD?? If any of this sounds enticing to you I suggest you struggle to find something meaningful to do with your life besides vegging out on so-bad-you-can't-watch-them videos.

A demonic figure named Tota (Felicia Pandolfi), who just may be the devil, seeks out troubled Oregonians to make a bargain with. She offers them a videotape that promises to provide the solution to all of their social ills. Only later do they learn the price they must pay if they do not follow her advice.

Five films in one year might have been just a bit too much for writer/director John Bowker to tackle. Hell, it would be probably be too much for Roger Corman to tackle pulling double duty like that. Seriously, you need more than a couple months to go from the beginning of pre-production to delivering a finished product. Maybe if Bowker had put all of his time, effort and funds into trying to produce just one good film per year, he'd have something.

As things stand, however, The Seekers is an example of fairly dreadful no-budget film-making. In a generous mood, I bestowed two extra points in my rating--one for the abundant gratuitous nudity and one for occasional forays into (probably) unintentional humor. Otherwise this stinker would get a 1. Be forewarned that the copious nudity features women who are mostly "interesting"-looking amateurs, and who often lean towards Rubenesque. I actually prefer to see those kinds of women, so if you're into that, it's worth a bonus point, but if you prefer glamorous, stick-thin model-types, you might actually end up subtracting a point for nudity.

The structure of the film seems like Bowker had a few shorts lying around that he didn't know what to do with, so he created a Ring (2002)-like "wrapper" to transform the material into a feature-length film. Note that "Ring-like" is not a reference to cinematic quality, atmosphere or any positive attributes. It means that Bowker watched The Ring and cribbed the idea to create "horror" based on someone watching a videotape. The result is a film that is mostly episodic, where the episodes have little to do with each other except for the fact that they're cut into the same film. Cheating significant others is a popular theme, but that sounds much more exciting than it is, since the couple short "sex scenes" are poorly blocked and edited. Bowker is better at directing naked solitary women, and in that respect, The Seekers resembles an extremely soft-core amateur skin flick more than anything else.

When he does attempt horror, which isn't often, The Seekers is mostly laughable. For some reason, even though the film was released by Sub Rosa Extreme, the horror/gore material is primarily unseen--sometimes due to staging, sometimes due to editing. What we do get to see are the results of a very elementary "Halloween Makeup Kit", and one surprisingly decent demon costume--with the exception, as another reviewer noted, that it looks like they taped Doritos to it. For example, one critical murder scene takes place off camera--we only see a black screen, and they don't even bother to put makeup on the victim. Another attack scene has the camera close on the attacker's back, so you just see, well, their back. In one particularly funny scene, poorly applied makeup begins to peel off of an actress' face as she very deliberately slides across a windowpane. In another funny scene, a character facing us is shot in the stomach with a shotgun, and they actually go to the trouble to hook up something like a squib on her back, but there is obviously no sign of being shot on her stomach--there's no entry wound.

Those occasional bursts of hilarious incompetence are unfortunately too few and too far between. With a steadier stream of such material, including the ridiculously bad performances and awful writing--such as Tota's full name being "Tota Levil", which characters do not catch the significance of until far into the film--The Seekers may have risen to a 5 rating, or "so bad, it's good". As it stands though, it's just "so bad it's only worth watching if you have an 'every-woman' amateur fetish", and if you don't, it's "so bad you'll want to poke your eyes out".

Wow, this was bad. Horrible acting and I do mean horrible with a capital H make this supremely low-budget 77 minute travesty about a bad acting blind woman giving copies of a video of an anthology of badly acted stories to random bad acting denizens of a small town feel like an eternity. Further, my nephew could make better more realistic special effects than in this piece of excrement, and he's a drooling invalid. And on top of all that the film is deathly boring, long stretches where nothing happens. And when it does, the 'action' mostly involving amateur fatties getting naked is nothing you'd want to see. Don't watch this movie.. I implore you.

My Grade: F

DVD Extras: Commentary; 43 minutes of on the set footage; 22 minutes of bloopers; music video by Seasons of the Wolf; and promo trailer

ANTI-Eye Candy: 3 fatties gets topless, and one not-so-fat one does the full Monty