Seed: German Limited Edition (2008) Starring Michael Paré, Will Sanderson & Ralf Moeller Directed by Uwe Boll Written by Uwe Boll

During my last trip to Wien, capital of Austria, I bought a large bunch of horror DVDs. Out of all of them I was mostly excited about Uwe Boll's Seed in a Limited Edition German DVD coffin box. The packaging looked amazing and when you combine this with the fact that I own a quite a collection of Boll's movies (even the one he directed Casper Van Dien as a serial killer) I had to buy it. In this article I will share my thoughts on the movie, as well as go into every aspect of this German DVD edition.

Michael Pare stars as detective Matt Bishop, a tough cop that is having nightmares caused by a brutal case he was working on. He was the only survivor in a final battle with Max Seed, deranged psychopath that slaughtered dozens, even hundreds of people. When being a young boy, poor Max was involved in an accident where he almost burnt to death and the terrifying experience changed him into a cold blooded maniac. Bishop has finally caught up with Seed and while his whole squad gets brutally massacred, he gets out alive with the killer in custody.

The movie's timeline often changes, resulting us witnessing some scenes in different timely orders, but the point of the movie is to present the painful process of finally catching the guy and then showing the Max Seed's bloody return. Because of an old and problematic electric chair, Max Seed was successfully electrocuted but that didn't kill him. The warden chooses to bury him alive and, as expected to us horror movie watchers, the "monster" gets out of the grave and starts a bloody revenge.

Uwe Boll has delivered quite a range of bad horror movies in his career. In my mind the two worst ones are game adaptations of "House of the Dead" and "Alone in the Dark". The latter one was probably his worst horror movie ever, because almost everything sucked there. Miss Tara Reid was so unbelievably pathetic in that movie, that I instantly became a fan. With every new movie he shot, Uwe Boll was little bit better. Don't get me wrong, these "achievements" are maybe big in Boll-o-sphere, but overall the movies were also quite bad. With "Seed" he touched a new level - I never thought that he could go even lower than the mentioned crapolas - watching "Seed" was really a painful process. To tell you the truth, I even dozed off for 5 minutes when the movie needed to show the final moments of suspense.

The acting in the movie was subpar, but you expect this so it is not something you would be shocked about. The main problem with "Seed" is that the movie really doesn't make any sense. It is a classic stupid story of a cop gets a maniac, maniac escapes and attacks cop's family. Combine this with disgustingly long and boring scenes and the 75 minutes of movie time will make you feel like you are watching 8 hours of miniseries focused on a Victorian family and their love problems. I felt appalled - Uwe proved once again that he is a great talent for making uber-crap.

I need to stress out that every "normal" person should bypass this movie in any possible way. It is recommended just for those connoisseurs of schlock (me included) that have that strange happy grin when they come across something that reeks of a terrible movie.

Seed Limited Edition German DVD

The German Limited Edition DVD sports a rather nice coffin box look and contains a number of special features that I will go deeper into, as well as sports an extra audio CD.

Audio/Video Details

Unlike the Limited Tin Edition of Boll's Postal, "Seed" has audio tracks in both German and English. When I first saw the DVD, I initially thought that they would surely scrape the English audio, but was pleasantly surprised to see both languages present. Needless to say that both audio tracks are in Dolby Digital 5.1. The video is presented in 16:9 widescreen and looks solid, a bit du dark and grainy in most of the killing scenes. DVD menus are of course on German, but even without knowing the language you will have your way around them.

Bonus Soundtrack CD

The back of the coffin boxed DVD edition proudly boasts that the set contains the complete soundtrack located on an extra bonus CD. The CD has 20 tracks and has a total lenght of just over 65 minutes. The soundtrack starts with a lighter nu-metal track that is in fact the Seed's audio theme. The song was pretty solid and I was interested in what the rest of the CD "soundtrack" has stored for us. Unfortunately all other 19 audio tracks are just audio samples from the movie, you know all the possible music backgrounds that are accompanying the movie's visuals. Maybe someone will appreciate this kind of a CD, for me it was practically not needed at all.

There was also some kind of a special edition Seed DVD with the same extras, but without the bonus soundtrack. Guess the soundtrack is one of the reasons for providing buyers the option of a getting a Limited Edition version of the DVD. Don't ask me, I bought it just because of the nifty coffin box.

Audio Commentary

Uwe Boll is always an interesting person to read about or to hear in audio commentaries. He is one of the directors that are ecstatic to talk about his great work and to further send "fuck you's" to fellow directors he hates. From the audio, with Seed he wanted to make his own version of a movie based on "Saw" and "Hostel" fame. Of course from his point of view those movies totally sucked and guess he saw himself as a perfect person to fill in the gap. I was primarily interested in listening why the hell most of his scenes were so long, but the closest I got to the answer was to hear him bragging about how cool was to shoot the whole movie from the hand.

Boll is a "PETA fan" and he explains why he used brutal animal killing videos on the start of the movie (impact on the society) and talks about how his pal Olaf Ittenbach shot scenes of different animal bodies rotting into dust. Besides maybe one or two killings in the movies, these PETA and Ittenbach materials are practically the most gory scenes in "Seed".

After yawning for a couple of times, somewhere around the movie's 60 minute mark, Uwe says good bye to us listeners and the audio commentary stops. I think this is something related to the Director's Cut edition, but nevertheless it was strange to see the director quitting the commentary when you expect to hear about his comments on the movie's unexpected ending.

Behind the Scenes

This 10 minute featurette is recorded during the shooting of the death penalty scene in prison. The camera traverses through the actors and staff, trying to find something interesting to focus on. Besides catching some funny Uwe Boll "directorial skills", the segment is rather boring. It practically doesn't offer anything interesting, other than showing that Uwe Boll really has a whole film crew on the set.

Deleted Scenes

I must say that this is one of the most weirdest deleted scenes I have ever seen. The actual scene in the movie shows Max Seed preparing to kill an old lady. The part that is "deleted" is placed just prior to this situation and shows the deranged killer doing different fitness exercises in front of a TV. To make this even more strange, the scene is accompanied with some kind of circus 70s music. Oh well...

Making of

The star of this 9 minute long documentary is Michael Pare, one of the favorite Boll actors that can be often seen in his productions. I was amazed to see that the first two or three sentences of Pare's comments on the movie clearly show why this movie was so lousy. Just imagine this - there was no script at all. Uwe Boll just had short synopsis on the movie and they were shooting the movie just based on the couple of paragraphs of ideas. Priceless information - thank you Michael for showing us what really went on. From his point of view this fact is a positive thing, just because Uwe is a "very talented director and he is the right person to do this kind of movie experiment". Guess again Michael...

Over and Out...

Ok so this was my take on Uwe Boll's "Seed" in Limited Edition German DVD box set. I rarely have time to watch a movie and all of the extras, so this was quite a journey. Hope you enjoyed me blabbering and yes, watch Uwe Boll movies. You just have to.