Seeds (1968)

Director:

Andy Milligan

Writers:

John Borske (writer)
Andy Milligan (writer)

Release Date:

December 1968 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Horror

Tagline:

Sowed in incest! Harvested in hate!

Plot:

An alcoholic matriarch terrorizes her spoiled, grown-up children during a family get-together where one of them flips out and begins killing all of them to get back at years of neglect and abuse.

Plot Keywords:

Abortion | Nudity | Drug Abuse | Poisoning | Doctor

Cast

Maggie Rogers	...	Claris Manning
Candy Hammond	...	Carol
Anthony Moscini	...	Michael (as Robert Service)
Lucy Silvay	...	Margaret (as Helena Velos)
Neil Flanagan	...	Father Mathew
Gene Connolly	...	Buster
David Hazard	...	Drew
Jonathan East	...	Peter
Patricia Dillon	...	Jessica (as Pauline Ramsey)
Paul Eden	...	Dr. Kram
Jesse Bigelow	...	Mortimer
Lisa Hart	...	Barbara
Eileen Hayes	...	Susan
Jerry Cortez	...	Jonathan
Rita Benning	...	Miss Bundy

Also Known As:

Seeds of Sin (USA) (reissue title)

Runtime:

84 min | 78 min (DVD version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Colour:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Australia:R | Canada:16+ (Quebec) | USA:Not Rated

Filming Locations:

Staten Island, New York City, New York, USA

Company:

Aquarius Productions

Trivia:

In 1995, Something Weird Video located a soundtrack for this film, which up to this time was "lost."

Movie Connections:

Edited into Twisted Sex Vol. 17 (1998) (V)

The Cinema of Pain

SEEDS (aka SEEDS OF SIN) is an incredible slice of homemade dementia from mad genius Milligan, who is surely one of the pivotal filmmakers of all time. Here, he's like Andy Warhol slumming as Ken Russell, in a plotless black and white romp about a way-dysfunctional family of sexual freaks meeting for the holidays, giving it to each other, and themselves, before mysteriously dying off in the last five minutes. This may be the perfect Milligan film, for it has all the Milligan trademarks, superb and pure, and serves well as a textbook on Andy's gutteral style and nihilistic philosophy: raspy sound; casual nudity; harsh lighting; people yelling; nice old houses; spontaneous sex; hand-held camera; rampant obscenity; claustrophobic sets; close, odd camera cropping; overenthusiastic acting; minimal/peripheral plot; mucho anger and betrayal; infantile sexual politics; everyone hates everyone else; familiar classical or stock music, overemoting of florid, hackneyed dialogue; everyone is corrupt and nasty and calculating; an abrupt, ambiguous, violent, traumatic ending; characters have severe sexual phobias, obsessions and/or aberrations; sex is primarily used as punishment, or part of a power struggle; features "butch" women and "catty," fey men, with a token "ingenue"; the plot is highly moralistic (ie. money and sin are evil), almost religious in its strident misanthropy; features a "Warholian" family of mismatched, sexually-crippled grotesques; creates a decidedly tortured universe from which there is no escape but via death. And pain. This movie is all about PAIN. Andy Milligan is God, for all of these reasons, as well as his ability to stir them all into a hideously compelling Milligan Stew of lust, madness, confusion, rage, despair and torment (i.e. PAIN). There is no filmmaker like Andy Milligan. He is a true original.