Friday, July 17, 2015

Demon Seed - 1982

Demon Seed, eh?  Demon Seed.  And no, I'm not in fact reviewing the 1977 film with Julie Christie.  This is the other Demon Seed, this one's alternate titles are Demon Rage and Satan's Mistress.  Yeah, that's the movie.  I added this to my Amazon Instant queue because the poster looked cool and the plot was about a woman having sex with a ghost.  Sounded okay enough to me to warrant a watch.  After all, I've seen movies that had absolutely nothing going for them:  no cool poster, no sex, nothing at all.

What I'm trying to say is that I just decided to see it, and walk you through a little bit of how I decide these things.  Free is always better, cool artwork is good, sex and nudity are good, actual actors are always a good sign.  I make this sound a little complex but it's not.  When you're a fan of movies there is nothing that you need to make you watch.  You watch cause it's what you do.

Demon Seed played out like a sort of mystery-thriller with a supernatural twist, and I at one point had to think while I was watching it, what were they going for with this film?  I earlier talked about in my review of Unforgettable, how in the 90's the genre of the sex-thriller became pretty popular, and I would argue that this film is a logical precursor to that genre.  It has a little bit of 70's charm and was influenced by the success of other supernatural stories, so that makes it different, but for most of the movie it's a sex thriller with a drama and even romance twist.

This movie stars two ex-James Bond girls, Britt Ekland from The Man with the Golden Gun, and Lana Wood from Diamonds are Forever.  I've long maintained that even though Bond girls are well known, and there a few exceptions to this rule, most of them don't have much of a career after that, or at least aren't known for other roles.  They are here showing off their best assets, and it's not their acting, but rather their large chests.  Yes, this movie does have plenty of nudity, and it's pretty common in the beginning, especially with Lana Wood.

You see, the plot as I said involves ghost sex.  This woman in a fizzled out relationship is getting fucked by a ghost.  She seems to go through this with no particular concern, and the movie just starts out with this happening, leaving us to wonder if this ghost sex had been happening for a while or if the time we saw was the first.  Either way she likes the sex, but is freaked out by it understandably.  Soon enough she's hiding out from her husband, going away to her bedroom while there's guests over, etc, all to let the ghost do her.

The ghost is visible to her, sometimes, he's a weird looking foreign dude that we don't know much about.  At some point he gains a real form and interacts with peeps, but mostly he just lingers in corners and looks all ghosty.  The movie kind of goes from there, and because that's not thrilling or interesting enough eventually it goes into some sort of possession and a standard convoluted, cluttered ending that I'm not really sure made sense.  But you know, that was kind of expected.

It's obviously not that high budget, and looking on imdb I see it was actually filmed in 1978.  It feels more like the 70's so that makes sense, plus the girls don't look like it's been over 10 years since they were in Bond.  The movie is mostly forgettable, keeps you interested enough, but doesn't fit the midnight movie, cult movie, drinking movie criteria.  In fact, it's almost good enough to just watch sober, except the end is a bit too much, and the movie can get pretty slow.  I think at 98 minutes, easily 10-15 of that could've been trimmed.

Overall, it's good enough.  2.5 stars.

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