Max Seed (Will Sanderson) is apparently a very good killer. In six years he has managed to kill 666 people. Detective Matt Bishop (Michael Paré) is trying to catch the guy. In flashbacks we see Matt watching video tapes that Max has sent to the police, which has apparently given them a clue since they have a warrant to search a place. They go in the dead of night, and only Max and Matt come out alive. Sentenced to death, of course, Max goes to the electric chair. After two jolts though, he is still alive. State law says if a person can withstand three jolts, he or she has to be set free after getting medical attention. Instead of risking that though, they declare him dead, and bury Max while he is still alive. We all know that isn't going to sit too well with Max.
Seed was a movie I wasn't really expecting to like in any way. Sometimes that works in my favor, as the movie might not be great but will end up better than I was expecting. That wasn't really the case with Seed. There were a couple of places I thought it worked, but those weren't worth watching the whole movie for. Before Seed ever gets going, a warning is thrown up about some scenes of animal abuse being real footage. Boll, who had watched the original footage (which I hear is much more graphic than what ends up in the film, not that it isn't graphic enough), wanted to include it in Seed so he struck a deal with PETA. They gave the footage to him to use so that more people would become aware, but they also got some money out of it. They got a small percentage off the proceeds. If this kind of thing bothers you, and I would hope it does, it might be best to just fast forward through this part of the movie. It might not be as graphic as the uncut film PETA provided, but it is still very hard to get through. This is a small part of the film, but important to anyone going to watch it all the same. As to how this was used in Seed, Max was watching it, or maybe it was supposed to imply that it was something Max was doing to animals.
The rest of the movie is as my title implies: it was very boring. On both IMDb and Netflix, they talk about the plot of Max Seed being put on the electric chair, being buried alive, and taking revenge. This is all well and good except that doesn't happen until somewhere after the 40 minute mark. Up until then we are shown some of the tapes that Max sent to the police, which shows animals, and then humans (which includes a baby), locked in a room (not at the same time of course). They are left to starve and then decompose. The baby one bothered a lot of people. We are also shown how Max was arrested. I assume we were shown all of this to give us a better understanding of why the police, and Matt especially, wanted Max dead. But for a guy that supposedly killed 666 people, do we really need more reasons to understand why he is so hated? Another big problem was when I realized this was taking place in the 1970s. It isn't impossible that Max had video cameras set up in his lair, but how likely would that be? Even with all the things police can use to find out who killed a person, it is still impossible to know just how many deaths are from one person. I'm sure it was even worse in the 1970s, so I was curious to know how they came up with 666 people outside of it being a number just about everyone knows.
The effects seemed to have impressed a lot of people, or at least they get talked about a lot. I didn't find them bad, but I don't see the big deal about them either. One scene does stand out above the rest, but only because the scene went on for a long time. A nameless woman who we had never seen up until that point shows up late in the film. She is tied to a chair while Max circles her with a hatchet in hand. Once in a while he would hit her with the blunt end of it. The longer this went on, the harder he would hit her. Eventually blood would start to splatter the walls around them, and her head became hard to tell it was still a head. The longer the scene went, well over 4 minutes, the worse the CGI seemed to get. It was hard to tell since after a while the head was so hard to see even though everything else was well lit. I could be wrong, but I didn't see any blood get on Max at all. The acting wasn't all that good, but there were a couple of spots that I did think was good. Too bad the rest of the movie couldn't have been good as well. Michael Paré and Jodelle Ferland, who plays his daughter, both had scenes either together or separate that turned out very good.
The scenes where the acting turned out good happens to be the only time Seed perked my interest at all. That was for like two scenes, and one of those was the end sequence. I liked the ending, but I didn't at the same time. I know some people feel it is over used, but I like endings that don't really end on a happy note. Outside of that though, Seed was very boring to me. This was one of the few times I felt a movie was out to show violence for the sake of showing it. I have a detachment some people don't with movies. I know it is just a movie, that it is all just special effects, so there has to be more than just a killing to get me invested into it all. Boll seems to think that just by showing some random person being killed, that will scare me. Show me who the person is, let me get to know that person so when that person is murdered I will feel scared for the person. I can't pick just on Boll for this, as many other directors/writers do the same thing. Boll does manage to push my buttons some when he puts Jodelle Ferland's character in danger. That is what I was looking for since we did get to know her a little bit at least before that happened. I have only watched this and House Of The Dead, which I can say that Seed was slightly better than. Maybe some day I will watch more movies by Boll, but I won't be looking for them.
2 out of 5 Never seen so many newspaper clippings
