Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Peter Manoogian
• Written by Jackson Barr
• Starring
  • Sam Hennings
  • Andrea Roth
  • Dane Witherspoon
  • Bernard Kates
  • Holly Fields
• Produced by Anne Kelly
• Executive produced by Charles Band

At first glance, Seedpeople may seem to be a movie in the same vein as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, either version. However, to assume this would be a mistake. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was, among other things, a cunning parable about how the quest for “un-American” Communist infiltrators was infecting the bright and wholesome suburbia that Americans had convinced themselves was the Promised Land; now anyone, even a neighbor you’ve known for years, might actually be one of them. The 1979 remake, by contrast, changed the setting to the city and jettisoned the politics in favor of presenting a cautionary tale of the isolation of the individual which follows, ironically, from the crowded environment of the city.

Seedpeople, on the other hand, is just a stupid movie about people being taken over by plant monsters.

We meet our protagonist, Tom Baines (Sam Hennings), from his hospital bed, as an FBI agent quizzes him on “what happened back there.” Wheee!! The entire flipping movie’s going to be a flashback, as Tom answers that question. Cue the harp run…

Despite how agitated he is, Tom’s got that natural storyteller’s instinct that allows him to tell his story from the very earliest beginning — no rushing to the important parts for the agent’s benefit. No, we begin as Tom goes home to the tiny hidden town of Comet Valley, a town which is going to be a little more isolated for the next three days as bridge repairs make impassable the single, solitary route into and out of the valley. (Please, anybody — is there any place in the entire U.S. of A. that can be so completely isolated that there’s only one road? Anywhere?) Tom’s a geologist, see, and he’s here to help a local, Thurman, search for meteorites; the town’s name comes from old Indian legends, but Tom and Thurman suspect that the terminology’s incorrect, and that there may be sizeable meteorites lying around, just waiting to be discovered.

Tom may also take the occasion to resurrect his acquaintance with his old flame, Heidi (Andrea Roth) — in fact, he can’t help but do so, as she runs the only bed-and-breakfast. Andrea’s got plenty on her plate, though; her sister died, so now her brother-in-law Frank (John Mooney) and his teenaged daughter Kim (Holly Fields) live with her, and she’s got some kind of on-again off-again thing going with Deputy Brad (Dane Witherspoon), who naturally used to be Tom’s rival.

Oh, and to keep things complicated, teenaged Kim is completely paranoid; the whole week, she’s been carrying on about the maid, Mrs. Santiago (Anne Betancourt) actually being an alien. Those kooky kids, I tell you.

I have to tell you, if I were the FBI agent I’d have told Tom to cut to the chase, already! Huge sections of the story take place without Tom being present, so you have to wonder how exactly he could relate how Frank went out to check the irrigation in the orchard at night and found a strange tree growing between the rows, with three strange blossoms on it. One is already “sprung,” but as he pokes at a second, it splits and spurts, uh… let’s just call it Jurgen’s Lotion, okay? And not just a little spurt; it literally buries him in the goo, then turns kind of crusty (did the director have ANY IDEA what any of this was going to look like?!?), and then — out pops a little alien monster critter, who immediately changes back into being Frank.

Blah, blah, blah, whole bunches of nothing happen. Kim tries telling people that her dad is one of “them” but naturally nothing comes of it; Tom goes and sees the pictographs which depict the meteor fall; Kim sees Mrs. Santiago turn into another one of the critters, but no one believes her; and Thurman and a farmer find the tree in the orchard. (Is this like a communal orchard or something? Does everyone in Comet Valley make it a point to check the irrigation on everyone else’s land nightly?) Fortunately, this farmer doesn’t get spurted on; instead, he gets buried in — Corn Pops! That’s night, it’s a really lame substitution for pollen, and it looks exactly like Corn Pops! (And then, the VideoZone segment at the end reveals what they used for this startling effect: Corn Pops! Gee, really? Was there a product placement involved here or something?)

I hope you’re satisfied with three little critters, because that’s all we get. Slowly, the other people in town fall under the seedpeople’s hypnotic control. Meanwhile, the town drunk/loonie Doc Roller (Bernard Kates — economical to combine them into a single character, isn’t it?), who naturally is the only one who Knows What’s Going On, knocks out the main phone relay so that no one can call out of the valley, because… I never figured that out. Because somehow he thought that isolating them further would help them fight the alien menace? Got me.

Tom’s still clueless, though. Even after a farmer shows him a “funny rock” he found (despite being a geologist, Tom’s not too good at that “animal/vegetable/mineral” distinction, as hours in a laboratory doesn’t reveal to him that the “rock” is a seed); even after the raving Doc Roller shows up, wearing fluorescent lights all over his body¹ and accusing Tom of being “one of them”; even after deputies and other people start disappearing, or acting really strange. No, it takes the accidental sighting of a creature to convince him, and then he starts sounding just like Doc Roller, trying to wake up the populace, or at least his ex-girlfriend.

Eventually, it’s up to Tom, Heidi, Brad, Kim, and Doc to stop all of the hypnotized townspeople from transplanting more space seeds from the space pinecone they came to earth on, to the good soil of the orchard. Will they stop them in time?

Who the hell cares?

It’s surprising that, despite the complete lack of secrecy about this being a Body Snatchers ripoff, everyone involved seems to have missed the whole point of the entire stupid exercise: the paranoia of not knowing who’s “real” and who’s one of “them.” No, Tom and his cohorts go about their business of stopping the insidious invasion without ever stopping for that moment of heebie-jeebies that makes one of these paranoia movies worthwhile.

On top of that, there’s pacing I can only describe as “flaccid”; really unscary monsters (naturally, the three are individually distinctive little buggers, just in case Full Moon wanted to start a new toy line); a complete lack of resolution on that whole “ex-romance” thing; and a “shocker” ending that was foreseeable from about the end of the opening credits. I mean, it’s one thing to be waiting for a bad movie to end; it’s another to be waiting for an end that you can predict with 100% accuracy.

Sigh…

Some Notable Quotables:

“What the ding-dong-heckmadoodle is that?”

- Ed the farmer, on finding the alien tree

“Who’s side are you on? Are you on the side of science?”

- Doc Roller to Tom

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Sam Hennings (Tom) was “Ramsey” in the early TNG episode “Angel One”
  • Bernard Kates (Doc Roller) played Sigmund Freud in the TNG episode “Phantasms”

1. See, the influence of the seedpeople is apparently negated by your average fluorescent lighting tube. Not by sunlight, which contains tons of UV radiation, but just by light tubes. Whatever. [back]