Devil Seed

Well, this is a horror flick I have a few difficulties with. It all looked well done but the budget makes it sometimes laughable and the scariness goes away by that.

A lot of effects is 100% CGI and it shows that it was the cheap kind of CGI. And some CGI is seen but the next shot is isn't there anymore, just watch the all crackle, next shot the wall is in excellent shape. When Alex (Michelle Argyris) is possessed you can easily spot the make-up. But it's not all that bad. The acting was rather good. I would recommend it for teenagers, not that creepy and bloody but with a lot of girls walking around in their underwear. The flick starts off very hot with Bree (Vanessa Broze) having sex but you can see what you will get, she's fully naked but you only see her for behind getting her ride. She makes it good in a shower scene were she goes full frontal when the camera zooms out.

All clichés from possessed flicks are here to see, the changing of the voice and face. Even the spiderwalk is here just like in The Exorcist (1973), of course the original is still the best. It's low on gore and on red stuff, it do has it's good moments but overall it's sometimes a bit laughable due the effects.

Ideal for teenagers to watch but buffs and geeks must stay away from it before they get possessed.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 1/5 Effects 2/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

I wasn't really expecting much, but this film did a good job. The topic, like most scary movies, has been done to death already. All Exorcism movies basically rip off--- I mean, "are inspired by" the Exorcist. They don't seem to venture into real world claims about the topic much, they just take what they know from watching other films. It's a missed opportunity, but it is what it is. Here it is handled pretty well. Three woman are living together, two are set up as close friends, and two are set up us rivals. The main character is a virgin, which means the demon just hanging around (it must have gotten bored waiting 50 years) wants to possess her most. Which I don't really get as far as real world logic, but, again, the trope is true to film logic. They handle it well. Her anguish makes it seem more likely at first that it is just mental illness, and it works when you think about the implications of losing your mind like that. When she goes full on demonic it's a dramatic contrast to her normal innocent behavior. All the men in the film are set up as losers, but it's not about the men. The film also has that weird logic about nudity that is prevalent where one scene seems to have skin very briefly for no reason and others, based upon what's transpiring in the film, would make a lot more sense to show nudity but are framed meticulously so that they don't. There are a couple of scenes later that aren't prolonged but aren't unrealistically short either. Overall, it's still kind of mild, at least for these kind of movies. Sill, if you like demonic possession films, this is slightly better than average. If you still have the itch after watching the classics, it makes a decent diversion.

Plain & simple: a horrible movie.

It tries to rip-off better movies, like The Exorcist or The Entity and fails miserably.

The opening credits are something straight out of YouTube. Wait, no, that's unfair...I've seen better opening credits in YouTube.

This was Greg A. Sager's first attempt at making professional movies...and I have an advice for him: please Mr. Sager, don't quit your day job yet. He is the Director, Writer & Editor of this abomination. At least he did an "ok" job in the editing dept.

The script is awful and completely ridiculous. It's filled with plot holes and full of ludicrous situations.

The acting is simply atrociously bad. There's not 1 good actor in the whole movie. I'm serious: sometimes it feels like a homemade movie, as if some friends just grabbed one camera and said "let's make a scary movie, you guys!".

Photography is a mess and I'm starting to feel like they didn't do the catering right.

The FX are complete trash. And most of them are just CGI. Bad CGI.

The only "redeeming factor" of the whole movie is that they took one of YouTube's most infamous "scary clips" and remade it almost exactly. So yeah, it's that unoriginal. But hey, at least they've proved that the YouTube video was a hoax...right?

Seriously...don't watch this poorly made and very badly acted piece of garbage. Remember that life is finite. You've been warned.

Watching this film, I was constantly struck by the way the director inserted himself into the project with such a loud thud.

Playing camera and light tricks that seem designed only to showboat his technique, what is really revealed is an object lesson in the old phrase "Knowing just enough to get oneself in trouble." I can only hope that with the passage of time, the director/writer/editor/Svengali behind this wet splat comes to be humiliated by how amateurish he once was as he's grown into creating valid works.

Plotwise, NO new ground is covered here. Not a centimeter of fresh ideas, but a fairly sizable contribution to teen-boy gratification fantasies wherein pretty girls say the c-word and a bleach blonde gives generously to the public nipple fund and the heroine is ...naturally, a virgin. Completely gratuitous gazongas (In the shower, of course!) is a sign someone has lost focus. This film doesn't ever seem to have bothered so much as looking for its reading glasses.

To get performances this poor on film requires determination in casting, extraordinary bad-luck or a George Lucas level micro-managerial determination to suck any kind of reality out of the otherwise human-shaped beings verbalizing and mugging on the beleaguered screen. Add to that a series of times where you can literally speak the dialogue before the characters do, and you have a morbid product to foist upon people who could have otherwise put that hour and a half of their fleeting lives into anything and found it more worthwhile.

The question of why it was made has been tossed out in a few reviews and while it seems like a bit of a mystery, I don't think it is at all. The answer lies in the opening of this review. It was a vanity piece created by a would-be auteur without talent or technique enough to assemble a film worth watching. I just hope he's able to grow using this film as experience. Another film this bad and Ewe Boll is going to be hiring hit people to come after this guy for working his stretch of sidewalk.

Best recommendation is for 12 year-old boys who've never heard of horror films before. THAT would be a happy group. Anyone else is going to find themselves checking their phones during most of this digital face-palm.

Thing that I can truly give this movie is that it at least isn't being like your average horror movie, in which a girl gets possessed by the devil. It does some new stuff and takes some good approaches to its subject. Well, in its first half at least. The second half of the movie unfortunately is far more clichéd and 'borrows' from several other well known genre movies. The more the movie progresses, the worser it gets.

The movie is only about 90 minutes short but it still feels way too long. It stretches things out, which cause the movie to get a bit tiresome after a while. OK, we get it! She is possessed, now get back to the story and tell us why and how it can be undone. It stalls for as long as possible and unfortunately there also isn't a good payoff to any of it.

It's all a real shame, since I actually was quite into the movie at first. I liked that it wasn't being like a typical modern horror-flick, involving teenagers. It seemed to take a far more clever and classy approach, despite its low-budget. Guess they forget about the script though, or perhaps they thought that half a good and originally written story would be enough to make a great genre movie out of.

It's weird how the movie successfully seems to avoid all of the genre clichés at first but then suddenly starts using every cliché out of the book and begins doing stuff that we have all seen before in different and far better genre movies. Yes, it doesn't look like it at first but in the end this movie is being nothing more than just another "The Exorcist" wannabe and knockoff.

The movie also becomes a totally unlikely one after a while, when its story starts doing some stupid things. Some of the events that happen in this movie are so unlikely and silly that they start taking away some of the suspension of disbelief. This especially goes for its very ending.

Still a good and original enough movie in some ways but in the end it's being nothing more than just another cheap and lazy "The Exorcist" ripoff.

5/10

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