PRIME EVIL: DEMON SEED (1982) ** ½

So, in between all the various horror franchises, sequels and remakes I’ll be reviewing this month for The 31 Movies of Horror-Ween, I’m going to try to sprinkle in a few reviews for some of the bizarre, offbeat, and generally WTF movies I stumble upon while perusing Amazon Prime.  If you’re like me, you find tons of this oddball oddities while searching Prime.  Most of them have misleading titles, strange thumbnail images, and/or cryptic plot synopses.  Whenever I find something that looks incredibly weird (and sometimes just plain bad), I immediately put it into my watchlist.  Folks, this is about as close to being in a video store and renting the most random, strangest movie on the shelf you can find as we’re likely to get in the 21^st century, so we must embrace it.

The first film in this (hopefully ongoing) column is Demon Seed.

Now, Demon Seed is a film that’s popped up several times while searching for other movies with the word “Demon” in the title.  I incorrectly assumed it was the Demon Seed where Julie Christie gets impregnated by a horny supercomputer.  I looked a little closer and saw that the cast list was completely different, so I took a chance on it.  As it turns out, Demon Seed is actually Fury of the Succubus, a movie I’ve always wanted to see after reading about it in Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In.  While it isn’t perfect, it made my jaw drop enough times for me to want to create this new column.

The opening crawl states, “Loneliness is the gateway to the supernatural”.  Lucky for us, our main character, Lisa (Lana Wood) is a lonely married woman who is about to have a run-in with the supernatural.  She lives with her family in a house by the beach and… can I interject something here?  Why is it all these emotionally troubled women in these movies live by the beach?  Is it because it affords the director an opportunity to give the audience endless shots of actresses wandering around in a daze in their nightgown as they slowly sleepwalk towards the crashing surf?  It certainly helps to pad out the running time, but it does diddly for the atmosphere.  

Okay, where was I?  Oh, after having a bad dream, Lisa’s asshole husband, Carl (Don Galloway) picks a fight with her and storms out of the house.  That night, she is attacked and raped by an unseen force.

Remember when Wood played Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever?  Well, she gets plenty of tool in this movie.  Invisible demon tool that is.  These scenes are a lot like the invisible rape scenes in The Entity, except done on a nonexistent budget.  That is to say, they just rely on Wood to roll around the bed naked a lot.  That’s right, Wood gets plenty O’Nude scenes too. 

The specter isn’t always invisible though.  Sometimes it appears as a purple smudge on the camera lens.  Other times, it’s a projection of Octopussy’s Kabir Bedi on the ceiling. Or sometimes, it’s a pulsating pink light.  About halfway through the movie, Bedi just appears and starts making love to her in the flesh.  By this time Wood has become his willing sex slave, which starts to put a crimp in her already testy relationship with her husband.

So, what does Carl do?  He asks her best friend Ann-Marie (Britt Ekland, from The Man with the Golden Gun, and if you’re keeping score at home, that’s THREE James Bond alums in the picture) to check in on her.  When their hot tub almost kills poor Ann-Marie, Carl finally starts to realize the Wood Lana has been getting belongs to the devil. 

All of this SOUNDS great.  The first half when Wood is getting naked and yielding her will to the sexual desires of an unseen demon is good times.  The second half isn’t nearly as much fun.  It’s here where Ekland’s character becomes more prominent (she was top-billed don’t you know), which gets in the way of the supernatural shagging.  You also have to put up with a lot of blurry-vision nightmare sequences, many of which are too dark to make out.  Speaking of which, there’s a potentially awesome accidental death-by-guillotine scene that’s completely undermined by the fact you can barely see what’s going on.  

It also hurts that Wood gets less and less to do as the movie wears on.  She basically just stands around looking catatonic for the second half of the film.  The finale, which mostly requires the cast to hang around a burning basement before a few of them accidentally stumble into the flames, is weak too.  Hey, The Entity’s ending sucked too so what did you expect? 

Despite that, there are enough moments of WTF lunacy here to make Demon Seed marginally recommended.  You also get John Carradine popping up in one scene as a priest who offers up a lot of helpful plot exposition shortly after a funeral.  All in all, Demon Seed is worth planting.

AKA:  Satan’s Mistress.  AKA:  Dark Eyes.  AKA:  Demon Rage.  AKA:  Fury of the Succubus.  AKA:  Incubus.