Written and directed by Sam Walker, The Seed is a bizarre new addition coming to Shudder this month. This alien invasion horror b-movie seems to answer the question of ‘what if someone had sex with E.T.?’ The answer is apparently hypnosis and forced pregnancy.
The story focuses on three lifelong friends; Charlotte (Chelsea Edge), Diedre (Lucy Martin), and Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) who have embarked on a girls’ trip to the Mojave desert to stay at Heather’s family holiday home. The trip to the desert coincides with a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower – one that causes their phones and Wi-Fi to lose signal. Following the shower a strange creature falls out of the sky, landing in the swimming pool.
Each of the three women all easily fit into stereotypical film girl roles – Diedre is the mean girl, Charlotte is the feminine tomboy, and Heather is the ditz. Diedre and Heather are rich while Charlotte is poorer. Diedre is a fame-obsessed social media influencer while Charlotte has no social media presence. The dialogue between these protagonists feels stunted and stuck in their roles, at times it feels like they were written by a bot with no clue how humans actually interact with one another.
They also each take somewhat different roles upon the creature’s arrival. Charlotte takes a strangely maternal role taking care of the creature and providing it with milk. Diedre and Heather, however, are disgusted by the creature and wish to either kill it or get rid of it in some other way. Of course, their views change once the alien hypnotizes them.
Somewhere in The Seed, it feels as if the genre changes, the fun campy feeling of the beginning is gone. Now we’re watching a not very good sci-fi alien invasion film, and now the horror-comedy-sci-fi B-movie that it first appears to be. Sadly the campy B-movie feeling is perhaps what the film had going for it and upon its loss, the story begins to just feel somewhat dull.
While the story and writing may feel somewhat dull the body horror is anything but. Not a film for the squeamish, the alien pregnancies and vore-ish conceptions will have you squirming in your seat. However, despite how gruesome the body horror can be, the most uncomfortable scene by far is when one of the adult protagonists kisses a 15-year-old boy.
Sadly the interesting premise of The Seed just ends up falling flat. Much of the story has been done before, and better, and the characters are grating and just one-dimensional. It’s pretty clear that while these women may not have been written by a robot, they were clearly written by a man, and is what he imagines women’s conversations with other women to be like.
The Seed will be streaming exclusively on Shudder from 10 March.
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Director: Sam Walker
Stars: Lucy Martin, Sophie Vavasseur, Chelsea Edge
Runtime: 91 minutes
Country: Malta & USA
