The seed - Il seme del male

The Seed (2021) is a movie I recently watched on Shudder. The storyline for this picture surrounds a group of friends who get an AirBnB in the middle of the desert for drinking, fun and sun. When they find a creature that looks like an armadillo on the property their weekend gets flipped upside down.

This movie is directed by Sam Walker in his directorial debut and stars Lucy Martin (Vikings), Chelsea Edge (Suspicion) and Sophie Vavasseur (Resident Evil: Apocalypse).

The storyline for this is actually fairly unique and clever. This is a very unique alien film; unfortunately, the female characters are annoying as is their reaction to things. I will say the workout scene and the sequance the armadillo moves had me cracking up. There's also some unique ways of eating eggs in this. I will say I liked the transformation elements as the aliens motives become apparent and the ending is actually pretty good.

Maybe I'm the outlier but I didn't hate this as much as so many did. This is a unique addition to the genre that's worth a viewing. It isn't a masterpiece but I would score this a 6/10 and recommend seeing it once.

The positives I think this movie brings are its use of colour, I think it has a nice way of using really poppy colours against its neutral backgrounds. It's other positive is the practical effects. Practical just trumps CGI every time. It as such another layer to the film making. Please can we bring this back!

The story is very paint by numbers and has definitely been done many times before but I wasn't that bothered by it. My biggest issue was the characters, they are poorly wrote for me. I don't understand why they are friends, particularly the brown haired one. There is no backstory and she just seems so out of place the whole movie. She also does really out of character things in line with the other characters but it's not done in a way that shows she trying to fit in, just "oh now she likes coke". I think her character needed more background to why she is friends with these people. That's totally not the point of the movie but it drive me insane lol.

It tries to be different, going for an absurdist tone. The trouble is, the script contains zero jokes or physical comedy. The poor actresses are left to recite mundane dialogue in a 'quirky' way, which leads to scene after scene of unamusing waffle. The characters are thinly drawn and nobody is taking it seriously enough to warrant investment. The acting is otherwise ok, as is the editing and general production design. The less said about the soundtrack the better.

It's a very tame movie. The effects are poor. The occassional body horror is nowhere near as brave as films like Society or Reanimator which precede it by decades. It has no tension to speak of, so it doesn't deserve a horror label. There's no exploration of ideas, so it's not a sci-fi either. It attempts to bring eroticism into the main plot which could have been great, but the film is too scared to embrace titilation, exploitation and nudity. It also shies away from allegory, symbolism, commentary, character development... you know, all the stuff that makes good schlock tick. Ultimately, it's boring.

I loved the gooey stuff, the creature, practical effects and scenes with trippy imagery. Yay to all of that.

Didn't like how annoying the characters were. I think that will put a lot of people off and they may not even make it to the goo. This could've been quite disturbing with a set of likeable characters. But I guess it was all intentional.

Props to the director for making a movie. It's hard. I'll watch his next film.

The Seed is an abysmal downer of a movie, with a plot that's so vapid, and characters who're utterly despicable. It's repetitive, boring, and substantially dull to the core. It doesn't even act as dumb fun. It's not fun, because it's unnervingly stretched out to the point that I had to skip forward through several scenes. The conversations between the girls have no point, the girls are highly dumb, and the mystery itself is a ticket to snooze-world. The alien has a face which could probably be the most laughable thing I've ever seen. And that's the only funny part of this. The moment I stopped taking that creature seriously, impatience steeped in, and add on top of that the shallow characters who're annoying as hell. So, I didn't care.

Now, I don't have all bad things to say. It's technically competent. The acting by the three leads was good, it's pretty gory, and there's a particular sequence, with girls and alien, more than halfway into the film which was pretty cool, and trippy. I give it 4 stars; 1 for the acting, 1 for the gore, and 2 for the mind trip sequence.

I'd probably have forgiven this, and would've maybe given 2 more stars, if our leading ladies' boobies got more screentime.