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Seedpeople
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (21st April 2025). |
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The Film
 Geologist Tom Baines (Drop Zone's Sam Hennings) returns to his home town of Comet Valley to examine a supposed meteor found by old friend Thurman (The Jigsaw Murders' Charles Bouvier) and lecture the local space nuts (just as the only bridge out of town will be closed for three days of maintenance). Not everyone is happy to see him, including Deputy Sheriff Brad Yates (Santa Barbara's Dane Witherspoon), Tom's rival for the affections of childhood sweetheart Heidi (The Collector's Andrea Roth) who owns the local bed and breakfast. No one believes Heidi's younger sister Kim (Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies' Holly Fields) when she swears that her father Frank (John Mooney) and housekeeper Mrs. Santiago (Jack's Back's Anne Betancourt) are possessed, but strange things happening in the orchards at night and the meteor hunters who venture in come back out different. When farmer Burt Moseley brings him an intact meteor that might just be part of the shower fifty years before that gave the town its name, he discovers that the outer shell is made of the same material that protects common seed embryos, Tom starts to believe crazy hermit Doc Roller (The Phantom's Bernard Kates) who claims the meteorites being unearthed around town are seeds that are just now gestating deadly living organisms. FBI agent Weems (Band of the Hand's Michael Gregory) and the story kills whatever momentum the film might have had while incessant narration and dialogue try to cover up scenes either never shot or cut to keep the film under ninety minutes. John Carl Buechler's monsters are especially rubbery and silly but not in the entertaining way they usually are, and the gore is well within R-rated standards of the nineties; the film could probably be shown on television intact in terms of gore but possibly not the suggestive orifices of the flower buds that spurt white viscous liquid over their victims. The photography of the usually excellent Adolfo Bartoli (Lurking Fear) is proficient but unspectacular, and no creative angles or lighting can distract from just how "cramped" most of the film's locations when it comes to any kind of action staging. It is not really worth gaging the performances since the scripted dialogue is as banal as most of the interpersonal business between action scenes. Most disappointing is that one kind of expects something more creative from a Paramount-era Full Moon feature - even if the budget, performances, and effects are not up to the filmmakers' ambitions - than a very average direct-to-video pic without the studio's stamp of character that could just have easily convinced as a Vidmark or Prism pick-up. 
Video
Seedpeople was released direct-to-video and laserdisc in the United States by Paramount in 1992 and in the U.K. by CIC Video (which would become Paramount Home Entertainment UK in 1999). The film would arrive on DVD stateside as part of the Full Moon Classics: Volume One five-disc set in 2007 – and the later as a single disc – while it did not get a U.K. DVD release until 2013 but all editions were the somewhat hazy nineties video master that is still available on streaming services. 88 Films' new 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from the same remaster that Full Moon themselves debuted stateside on Blu-ray last year. While the transfer does not necessarily enhance one's appreciation of the film's budget-hampered look, it does reveal more of the film's rough edges including wires directing some of the "tumbleweed" aliens and the fact that the video noise in the shots through Kim's camcorder viewfinder are an overlay with a static pattern of lines and dots. Detail is generally good, although some of the second unit insert shots look a bit grittier, and the contrast in a couple shots of Hennings in his hospital bed under a bright light might be dialed up a bit too high; and, yet, as with quite a few of Full Moon's more recent remasters, these warts and all presentations are still the best the films have ever looked (especially the direct-to-video ones). 
Audio
As expected, the Full Moon Blu-ray offered both the original Ultra Stereo mix and a 5.1 bump-up but only as lossy Dolby Digital options – the 2.0 option being the default and the 5.1 and SDH subtitle options only accessible via remote either as a means of saving on authoring costs or a limitation of the authoring software – while 88 Films offers the stereo track in 24-bit LPCM 2.0 and the surround upmix in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 as well as SDH subtitles via a set-up menu. We did not really detect much of a difference between lossy and lossless here, but the 5.1 track is an okay offering if not as creative as a full remix could have been with the tumbleweed alien and spurting body snatcher plants. 
Extras
As with the U.S. release, the disc also includes the original 1992 Videozone (9:54) making-of piece featured at the end of the VHS and laserdisc presentations and as the often sole substantial extra of the DVD editions, as well as the video trailer (1:42), but 88 has also included a new audio commentary by film historians Dave Wain and Matty Budrewicz in which they concede that this is one of the most conventional films of Full Moon's peak Paramount years and also one of three iterations of the "body snatcher" concept that all came out around the same period; indeed, they suggest that producer Charles Band might have greenlit it with the insider knowledge that the other films were in-development due to the involvement of Empire/Full Moon alumni, with Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers originally intended for Stuart Gordon and co-scripted by Dennis Paoli while Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters had been co-scripted by David S. Goyer. They also discuss the unacknowledged contribution of director Peter Manoogian to both Empire Pictures and Full Moon, having gone from the "testing ground" of directing a segment of The Dungeonmaster to the hellish shoot of Eliminators and the effects-intensive Arena, both Empire productions that were meant to be bigger works than they ended up. They also reveal from their interviews and research gathered for their book It Came From the Video Aisle!: Inside Charles Band’s Full Moon Entertainment Studio that both Manoogian and screenwriter Jack Canson – who penned the film under the pseudonym "Jackson Barr" that he had adopted to sell his script for Nowhere to Run (the 1989 film, not the 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme film) to Julie Corman during the WGA writer's strike and would use it on subsequent Empire and Full Moon projects (having been brought into the Band fold by colleague Ted Nicolaou – also thought that Seedpeople was going to be a better work than it ended up. 
Packaging
The first pressing comes in a rigid slipcover with a foldout poster.
Overall
Although thoroughly lacking Full Moon's stamp of character, the "body snatcher" clone Seedpeople may prove a diversion for fans of the studio and nineties science fiction.
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