"The Seed" satirizes influencers in name of gross, goopy cosmic-horror fun

The Seed (2022)

A lit girls' weekend gets weird and squishy following a meteor shower in “The Seed,” a satirical cosmic horror B-movie that gets its sick kicks out of pawning fake-famous influencers. Even if 91 minutes starts to be a stretch for a straightforward “Invasion of the Hot Body Snatchers,” British writer-director Sam Walker’s feature debut entertains nonetheless. If you’re down for some grotesquely goopy (and tactile) practical effects this side of Brian Yuzna’s bonkers, jaw-droppingly icky social satire “Society,” “The Seed” is gross fun.

Longtime girlfriends Deidre (Lucy Martin), a vapid social-media model, and Charlotte (Chelsea Edge), an anti-social media granola-cruncher, join yogi Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) at her daddy’s luxury house for a chill weekend of tequila shots and weed in the Mojave Desert. Deidre plans on posting a photoshoot by the pool, and in seven hours, there will be a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower just in time to live stream. As the shooting-star event is underway, something falls from the sky and into the pool. It’s a foul-smelling creature, and the girls think it’s an armadillo or a slimy bear. What happens next will be much worse than their phones glitching and turning off. It’s true, Earth girls really are easy.

“I love the pet store, but I really needed a couple of days off,” says a high-by-the-pool Charlotte, the only one with a nine-to-five job. Before these characters largely become meat puppets, Walker does allow us to have a little time with these girls. There are very tiny shreds of what this trio’s relationship used to be like, and seemingly as a throwaway, it’s established that Deidre and Heather clearly have insecurities when it comes to their love lives (but they'll reach climax sooner than they think). Lucy Martin runs with her two-dimensional role as the acerbic, annoyingly narcissistic Deidre, while there’s something endearingly dippy about Sophie Vavasseur’s in-betweener Heather. Then there’s Chelsea Edge, bringing a welcome individuality to Charlotte, clearly our tough final girl. 

“The Seed” is mean, strange, creepy at times, and more than a little campy. Once Deidre and Heather go beyond the point of no return and feel “amazing,” the actresses really go for it with a fearless lack of vanity, whether it’s oozing black goo from their mouths, quickly slurping up spaghetti, or eating raw eggs (shell and all). The creature effects are lovingly crafted, tangible, and suitably slimy, making the "armadillo" look like an adorable crying baby one minute and an all-powerful alien boss the next (especially when it's given the master bedroom). The film won’t throw viewers into the psychedelic ecstasy that it does for its manipulated characters, but it surely works as a nifty showcase for naked flesh submerged in alien skin and tentacles. Disgusting an audience is one thing, but disgusting them in the name of fun is something "The Seed" does modestly well on a budget. 

Grade: B -

Shudder is releasing “The Seed” (91 min.) to its streaming service on March 10, 2022.