Seed 2: The New Breed (2014)
Directed by: Marcel Waltz
Written by: Marcel Waltz
Starring: Annika Strauss, Caroline Williams, Christa Campbell, Jared Demetri Luciano, Manoush, Natalie Scheetz, Nick Principe, Sarah Hayden
What is it all about?
Coming back from her bachelor party in Las Vegas, Christine and her friends are driving through the hot desert of Nevada. But they are not alone – serial killer Max Seed is back and he brought the whole family.
The Hughes Verdict!
Did the world really need a sequel to Seed which was directed by the one and only Uwe Boll? The fact that Boll himself bolted from the sequel should tell you enough at the quality that you about to witness and the film which landed on my lap has had notorious reviews, so even for myself, being a huge slasher fan, I thought I was going to watch something awful and horrid.
Those initial thoughts were too damn right. Seed 2: The New Breed or in some places Blood Valley- Seed’s Revenge, is an awful film. A kind of Grindhouse style shocker that is as nasty as it tries to be. Any film that starts with a masked serial killer raping his victim with a gun, shows the intend that the makers are trying to give to its audience. Its a case of forget about plot and just go for simple shock value and while I must admire the attempt of those behind the camera, and in some way, underneath the carnage that follows, there is a story underneath it all, even though I can not forgive the way the entire plot is handled.
Make no mistake, Seed 2 is a terrible movie, even for a Slasher standard, simply because throughout the entire mere running time of 78 minutes (believe me it seems longer), the plot hacks away from end to beginning to middle, to end and back to beginning again. By trying to be too clever for their own good, the makers have given the viewer not art, but an headache and at times I found it painful to watch.
If you can not remember the original Seed then you have nothing to worry about. The original was in the traits of the old 90’s horror of serial killer surviving the electric chair and then going after the people who put him there. Being a Boll film, we all expected it to be awful, even though it had some moments that had me sitting up with interest, (most films of Boll do), the sequel which is now directed and written by Marcel Waltz who decides to ignore most of what happened in the that film and go down its own path. Instead of a “Halloween” blue print, what we get now is the Hills Have Eyes route, with Max Seed now bringing his family along for the ride.
The film starts with that now lodged in my memory “gun rape” and then jumps back in time to see how this characters got there. Sometimes the time loop in a film works to great effect, but not when it comes to a horror that just wants to be a slasher film. It be like watching Halloween and seeing Dr Loomis shooting “The Shape” from the bedroom…..then jumping to Myers as the young boy killing his sister, before then settling down to Laurie walking home from school. If John Carpenter shot his masterpiece like that, I very much doubt there would have been any Slasher boom in the late 70’s, early 80’s. If that sounds fucked up, then you can see why I am trying to tell you the whole point of Seed 2 is like this. So proud is the director of this scene which see’s Max lick the gun afterwards (yes scraping the barrel here), that the scene is shown again 40 minutes later. Like once weren’t bad enough guys.
There is a jist of a plot, and it would be a good one if Hills Have Eyes and its remake did not get there first. Stop and think for a minute where and what films you have seen this before.
A gang of friends RV breaks down in the middle of a dessert!
A mysterious Hitch-hiker!
A Cop that turns out to be part of the sick family!
Even by highlighting those main points of the plot you would think you re-watching either Hills Have Eyes or even Texas Chainsaw, such is the blatant copy that I, who has seen many things in my time at HCF, could not believe. But of course ripping off other ideas from different movies is hardly knew, Tarantino himself made a successful career out of it and he be the first to say, “If you going to do it, then try at least put your own spin on it!”. Seed 2 even tries to ape Quentin with its Pulp Fiction editing but sorry Waltz you are no QT, and the only spin you put on this tale is to be nasty as possible for shock value.
I can not stress to the readers of HCF how tortuous this is. I hate jumping on the bandwagon of films given bad negativity as I love to find some good moments in every film I review, but being a huge fan of Slasher movies, I can not even to this day understand how makers and writers can simply fuck up the formula. A man in a mask hacking to death poor written characters can be a joy to watch, I mean Jason Voorhees has been doing it for over nearly 25 years, you only got to look at Adam Green and what he has done with his HATCHET franchise and realise that there is still an appetite for this kind of material.
Sadly Seed and the character of Max comes into the category of “late 80’s”, the bad masked killers that give slash films such a bad name, Which is a rotten shame because in between the original and this, there is a cool character underneath the mess we witness. Maybe instead of bringing his family on the road, they should have stuck to just a similar tale we all know, because during Seed 2 all I could think of “Is why I am watching this” when I got the original tale of the Carter family and their caper in the mountains in my DVD collection, demanding a re-watch.
But despite all my negativity, Seed 2 should appeal to the hard core out there, there is a kind of sadistic Rob Zombie vibe to it all, but for me personally, hating Zombie’s version of Halloween, perhaps I was the wrong person to review this for the site, even though I love nothing much but slash.
With vicious editing making the film nothing but a hard slog and with a nasty streak filling the disjointed running time, Seed 2 is a kind of film, you probably have to make your own mind up……..
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