The One Boll Didn't Direct: Seed 2: The New Breed (2014)

Seed 2: The New Breed (US/Canada, 2014) (AKA "Blood Valley: Seed's Revenge")
Rating: **
Starring: Natalie Scheetz, Nick Principe, Caroline Williams

Why on Earth would anyone be interested in doing this? I mean come on, did Uwe Boll's film Seed really needed a follow-up? With almost little to no horror junkies out there supporting that movie, where is the point of marketing a franchise surrounding a film so utterly unlikable and pathetic even for a trashy horror film?

I guess if someone else would direct it, the film could work, so let's all thank the gods that this was the case; Boll only acted as the producer for Seed 2: The New Breed and handed the directorial job to Marcel Walz, a German director who apparently had done a lot of horror films which I've never seen or heard of before. (Not that I'm ashamed of that fact. I do have a life outside horror!)

Here, we follow four bachelorettes driving through the desert after their party last night but only to meet some strange fellows along the way before being stranded due to a dead car engine. Around this time, a mysterious police woman offered her help to them but unknown to the girls, she's simply leading them to meet a good friend of hers: Max Seed, the star murderer of our prior movie.

I will say that the only good thing these Seed films seem to do is that they come up with some pretty shocking (and sometimes disturbing) scenes; the first did this by showing us real black-and-white footages of a fox hunters abusing and skinning foxes alive, had a part where a baby is starved to death and, perhaps its most notorious, show us a lengthy scene where a chair-tied woman was bludgeoned to death with a hammer. (which is, as unflinchingly mean-spirited it is, done away in CG) Sadly, as shocking as these scenes are, the empty plot vouched nothing for the first movie, making it a rather pointless bodycounter which sole purpose is to upset us blood, gore and violence. Seed 2 is nothing different; it's still a messy, plotless dreck that seems to be a mix of 2003's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and 2006's The Hills Have Eyes reboots, only it does the tension play a little better and it's hardly boring.

Perhaps the interesting bit about Seed 2 is that decided to do a non-linear plot flow similar to Tarantino's classic crime thriller Pulp Fiction, where, starting from the second act, scenes are jumbled as we see victims killed, injured or left alive in one moment but seen alive later otherwise. It's like a huge puzzle where we get to piece things together and once we do...

uh, well, not much really.

As mentioned before, Seed 2 is still generically plotless, with its gimmicky time-jump story-telling the only thing that made the tension working for it. It's no different from the other misogynistic new age slasher/torture porn hybrids out there, with a "big" reveal that, while it ties this film with the first, isn't really all that amazing. (Honestly, the movie could still function without this twist) There's grit in its kills and torture awaits for each victim (thanks to the effects work of Ryan "Gutterballs (2008)" Nicholson), but some of the elements just don't go too well. (There's some religious mumbo going on with our killers, which is strange considering there's no hint of Max Seed being a religious nut in the first.)

Not gonna lie, this is "sort-of" an improvement from the first, but I'm not too hot for this franchise yet. Maybe if they try something a little deeper without boring us to death (or, as I like to put it in my own terms, "Boll-ing it"), I might give consider another Seed movie a go. For now, Seed 2 is trash, but its a considerably watchable trash.

Bodycount: (in chronological order)
1 female had her neck crushed
1 male stabbed on the neck with a rail spike
1 male disemboweled with a kitchen knife, strangled with his own innards
1 female shot on the groin
1 female shot on the head
1 male bludgeoned with a hammer
1 female gets a broken neck
1 male had his throat cut with a machete
Total: 8