By Tristan Bishop
OK, It’s a fair cop, I admit it – I rather enjoyed Seed (2007). I watched it when I was in the mood for something nasty and nihilistic and boy did it deliver. Yes, it wasn’t the classiest slasher film ever made, but it easily stands as one of the most grim and brutal – and the fact that it was directed by the legendary Uwe Boll and didn’t completely stink probably made me appreciate it all the more. Now, seven years later, a sequel appears, this time merely produced by Boll, as writing and directing have been taken over by young German Marcel Walz, who, despite still being in his twenties, appears to have already completed several features, such as Le Petite Mort (2009).
The story here is basically a very simple one indeed – four women are on a hen weekend/road trip. When the girls discuss their route home, Christine (Natalie Scheetz), the bride-to-be, is very reluctant to take a certain way back through the desert, but her girlfriends decide it will be a more ‘scenic’ route and convince her otherwise. Turns out that’s a pretty bad idea, would you believe. First of all they encounter a creepy hitch-hiker who, whilst they originally deem him to be ‘cute’, turns out to have an unhealthy interest in the German girl (Annika Strauss). Soon after they are rid of him, they encounter a stranded female cop (Manoush – just the one name) who also appears to be German (although no-one remarks on her heavy accent being unusual) and who insists that two of the girls accompany her into town whilst two stay at their van. Of course she’s leading them into a trap for Seed, and soon enough the girls are being mangled beyond all recognition.
It feels like a massive spoiler to write the above, but truth be told, it isn’t. This is because the film takes the remarkably wrong-headed step of showing the scenes out of sequence a la Pulp Fiction. Of course, this is an entirely valid thing to do if, say, you’re as good a writer as Tarantino and can actually achieve narrative intrigue by doing this. But Walz is not as good a writer as Tarantino – in fact, it turns out he’s not even as good a writer as Uwe Boll – and therefore the effect of the scene displacement is twofold – a) it spoilers any tension the film might have conceivably mounted, and b) it’s just bloody confusing for the first thirty minutes or so.
My theory is that the film was put together this way so it would open the way it does – Seed inserting a revolver into the vagina of one of the girls for an unpleasantly long amount of time before finally pulling the trigger and then, er, licking the gun. It’s tasteless, shocking, and, unfortunately, the only scene of note in the entire film. Walz was obviously fully aware of this, because the scene gets repeated again in its entirety later on!
There isn’t a great deal to enjoy here – the four girls act to a decent standard, but the supporting characters are uniformly terrible, the cinematography is passable yet the entire film is overly bright and off-putting (I had to turn the colour down) whilst the script goes from downright clunky to utterly baffling. By the end I couldn’t quite work out the relationship between Seed and the other characters (despite them supposedly all being related in some way), and the film tries for some religious imagery and apocalyptic wittering which just ends up limp. There is some fairly OTT gore on display but unfortunately it ends up being too little and too late, which is really not what I was expecting after the nastiness of the original.
The film ends up coming off as a very low budget version of the Hills Have Eyes remake more than it does a sequel to Seed, and in fact the retitling of the UK release (The on-screen title is merely Seed 2), along with the godawful artwork, seems to back this up. In fact, our very own Nia didn’t even realise this was a sequel to Seed at all (and she knows a bit about marketing). In a way this is doing a favour to whatever fans of the original are out there, as this is not the film they would have wanted. In fact, save for people who REALLY like seeing girls in denim cut-offs get murdered, I can’t really see that this is a film anyone would have wanted.
Seed 2 or indeed Blood Valley: Seed’s Revenge is available now via Phase 4 Films.