Awesome Movie

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Andy Milligan co-wrote, directed, shot, and did the costumes for this grimly effective exploitation feature. It stars Maggie Rogers as Claris Manning, a vile and hateful bitch if ever there was one. Now her grown-up children are all putrid and hateful in their own ways, and she's convinced (probably not incorrectly) that they're waiting and waiting for her to drop dead so her fortune will become available to them. The old lady's daughter Carol (Candy Hammond, whom Milligan married during filming) invites the ugly brood over for a Christmas dinner, and things turn ugly in more ways than one. Some of the family members start dying off in various ways."Seeds" is one of those trash flicks that makes up for in spirit what it may lack in technical polish. It may indeed be "rough around the edges", but Milligan and his co-writer John Borske concocted a wonderfully sordid story and wonderfully sordid characters here. It's all compelling in a really twisted way, especially since incest is a theme that recurs throughout. And because so many of the characters are despicable (including house staff that have their own scheme in the works), we're only too happy to see these people bumped off.There isn't that much in the way of graphic violence, but exploitation devotees will be delighted to note the abundant nudity and sex. The lack of a big budget helps to create a truly depraved and, well, seedy atmosphere. There are very few settings used, with most of the action confined to the house.The dialogue is often very amusing, and better than one might expect, and the same goes for the performances. Rogers, in particular, is memorably hideous as one of the nastiest mothers in screen history.As some people likely already know, this is also available in an alternate cut, "Seeds of Sin", which trims out a lot of Milligans' original material and adds new sex scenes with different actors, in an attempt to increase the pictures' possible revenue.This could make for interesting alternative Christmas time viewing for more adventuresome movie lovers.Eight out of 10.

A rotten dysfunctional family of bitter, bickering, back-stabbing folks gather together to celebrate Christmas. The reunion naturally sets everybody against each other as everyone's worst secrets are exposed. The situation comes to a deadly head when a mysterious killer starts bumping people off. Notorious Do-It-Your indie exploitation filmmaker Andy Milligan lets his trademark misanthropy and debauchery run rampant in this movie: Leave it to Milligan to populate the seamy story with a rich array of horrible individuals who include a nasty crippled alcoholic matriarch (played with unsparing harshness by Maggie Rogers), a brother and sister who had an incestuous affair as kids, a shady overcharging doctor, a hypocritical pedophile priest (an excellent performance by Neil Flanagan), a pair of scheming live-in servants, a pathetic homosexual, a snarky stuck-up blonde, and a brazen strumpet. Milligan captures the anguish and suffering of these colorfully awful characters with such merciless acuity that in a way it's a relief that the bulk of them meet brutal untimely ends. Moreover, Milligan tosses in a handy helping of gratuitous female nudity and sordid soft-core sex for sleazy good measure. A deliciously depraved doozy.

**Possible Spoilers**A recently re-discovered black and white murder melodrama, shot in the same Staten Island house where THE GHASTLY ONES was made (I recognized the tacky wallpaper) and featuring it's star, Maggie Rogers. This time she plays an alcoholic old biddy whose twisted daughter (Candy Hammond) holds a family reunion without her permission. Come to think of it, I wouldn't want a family like this around either; they're the worst bunch of liars, thieves, arsonists, psychos, satyrs, nymphos and all-around perverts ever congregated under one roof. Various siblings lust for each other, even as they despise each other. One of them is also a killer and various victims are electrocuted, hacked, stabbed and strangled. One woman has her face eaten away by acid (no home should be without it) in one of Andy's goriest scenes ever. A victim in a wheelchair is rolled down a staircase–a startling scene, but Richard Widmark did it better in KISS OF DEATH. Milligan's sordid story on it's own should have been enough to please sleaze-hounds but it's prefaced and punctuated by near-hardcore sex scenes -- 21 minutes worth altogether--featuring actors not related to anything else in the picture. These inserts feature primitive Sixties "mod" music rather than Milligan's peculiar library music, are garishly lit and were obviously shot by someone else. They destroy whatever sense SEEDS OF SIN might have had and their only purpose, other than padding out this feature, is to demonstrate why the fast-forward button was invented. Milligan regular Neil Flanagan (GURU THE MAD MONK!) appeared in trailers to this film but not the padded, re-edited version just discovered by Something Weird Video. While I'm always grateful when one of Milligan's rarities surfaces, I would have liked to have seen this picture as he intended it. Previews for GURU THE MAD MONK, LOVE HUNGER and other obscurities appear at the end of the tape. There's even a trailer for SEEDS OF SIN, showing scenes that were cut out of the re-edited print. Talk about adding insult to injury..

Say what you want about Andy Milligan - but if his family was even 10% as deranged as the one in this film, well then I guess he could have turned out worse. Unfortunately, the video print of this film contains sex scene inserts originally shot by the distributor to boost the picture's box office appeal. Several times during the film Milligan's ugly camerawork and silent film music abruptly ends, and suddenly good-looking stand-ins for Milligan's homely actors take over and start doing it to psychedelic 60's guitar rock. It's pretty easy to fast-forward through if you're trying to pay attention to Milligan's original film, which, unfortunately, is missing quite a bit of action that was cut to make room for the added sex scenes. What remains, however, is still compelling stuff. I don't think I've ever seen a more hateful mother in any film before.