Why So Blu?

Blood Valley: Seed’s Revenge (DVD Review)

Just so you readers know, when I do my reviews for things, I will do my research.  When I was sent Blood Valley: Seed’s Revenge, I discovered it was the sequel the 2007 Uwe Boll film Seed.  So, I went and watched the first film in preparation to do this review.  What I wound up witness was an unnecessarily mean spirited and brutal horror film that had no spirit, no life, just beatings and killings that the camera refused to go away from.  Some people claim that Rob Zombie as a director has a hard time showing restraint, well, Uwe Boll surely puts that notion to bed here.  I’m one that has an appreciation for gore effects, too, but with no real heart or purpose to any of this it was just no fun and no good.  Uwe didn’t return to this second one and it looked more of a typical slasher, so I had some small hope it’d be better.

Film 

Christine is off with her friends in Las Vegas for her bachelorette party.  They’ve taken an RV through the desert to get there and now they are on their way back.  But low and behold, Seed is back and aimlessly hanging out in the desert.  This time he’s got a wife and kid to help him plot out his murders for some sort of higher purpose that this movie doesn’t even care to tell you about.  Death, kill, kill, girls scream and are sexually assaulted.  So much fun.

From the opening frame of the film, I was almost ready to turn this thing off and toss it away, but its a review and I’m gonna finish what I’m starting.  It opens with Seed and a tied up bloody scantily clad woman on the bed of an RV with him penetrating her with a revolver.  As he “finishes” he fires on her, killing her, and then licks the bloody shaft of the gun.  Sorry to be so graphic, but this is how the damn film starts.  Its more of the ridiculous, offensive, mean spirited stuff that I know Uwe (while he didn’t direct) is putting in here because he finds it funny.  If this movie had any sort of story, any sort of strength, weight or reason and purpose for this even to happen, I’d be more forgiving of it.  As it is though, this whole scene was likely the reason they made the damn movie because they thought it was edgy and graphic.

This is one sloppily made movie.  It has some cool practical effect work, but the film itself is cheap and shitty looking.  None of the dialog in this film matters at all.  There’s the tiniest bit of story and ideas but nothing makes sense and nothing works.  Its incredibly lazy because they quite frankly don’t care.  They’ve also made the decision to chop of these scenes and randomly scatter them in the movie.  And they’re so proud of the gun in the vagina trick that we get to see the whole damn thing TWICE!  I’m not joking these scenes are scattered like its Memento without a purpose or a plan.  And, some of this shit you think might be answered later, doesn’t get answered at all.  There is a random naked woman who is murdered in this movie and still have no idea who she is.  I thought it was one of the friends and we’d see how she got there later, but alas no dice.

Caroline Williams being in the film kind of enticed me a bit.  She’s one of my favorite B-movie horror actresses from the 80s/9os.  However, she’s relegated to seriously…1 scene and about 5 lines of dialogue.  A whole scene that could be removed from the movie and nothing would be changed.  Its like, SWEET we have Caroline Williams for 3 hours, lets do something!  Superfluous and dumb.  Sorry Caroline.  Instead we’re treated to actresses that make the stars of Andy Sidaris films look like Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchet.  This movie is pretty torturous to get through.

Its no secret, I did not like this movie at all.  If anything I found it worse than the first movie as it lacked any sort of story or purpose to do anything.  We’re supplied with much much weaker performers in a cheap shitty horror movie.  I’ll give the makeup and effects department props though, because for how low grade this movie is, they did a pretty good job.  Other than that, this is some mean spirited garbage I’d rather go to bed and forget ever happened.

Video 

Encoding: MPEG-2

Resolution: 480i

Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1

Clarity/Detail:  The image is pretty whited out, but there is some detail of things like wood grain, and other objects and the like in closeups.  The image is surprisingly sharp.  Its kind of a good looking ugly picture if you catch my drift.

Depth:  Average for a DVD.  Not too flat, but nothing outstanding either.

Black Levels:  Blacks are deep and mask a lot of detail.  This most likely is due to this being a DVD, but that’s how it is.

Color Reproduction:  Everything is bleached out and whitened.  Reds are deep and rich.  Nothing really pops, but there’s not a whole lot to go off of when the whole thing takes place in the dessert with an RV interior that has no character.

Flesh Tones: Flesh tones look a little white and bleached out, but are consistent throughout.  Facial details are discernible in closeups but for the most part skin looks rather smooth.

Noise/Artifacts:  Clean.

Audio 

Audio Format(s):  English 5.1 Dolby Digital, French 5.1 Dolby Digital

Subtitles: N/A

Dynamics: A rather average presentation.  There’s a minimal amount of some peaking in the master.  This is just loud to be loud.  There’s now real variance in score, effects and voice as they all just sort of sound mixed together and at the same volume.

Low Frequency Extension:  Score hits and a couple moments of violence are accentuated with the subwoofer.

Surround Sound Presentation:  The rear speakers are relegated to mostly ambient sound and that generic metal score.  There is a little bit of right to left interaction, but nothing to write home about.

Dialogue Reproduction:  Dialog is audible, but a lot of the times sounds like it was in a an or muffled.

Extras 

Interview With Caroline Williams – “Mother” (SD, 3:46) – For someone who couldn’t have been on set but a mere couple hours, the actress sure has a lot of deep and intricate thoughts about this film.  However, I feel she’s just blowing smoke out of her ass to support the film.  Nice to see her getting the work though, she deserves much better than this, though.

Interview With Christa Campbell – “Olivia” (SD, 2:39) – The pistol penetrated actress talks about how “fun” working on the movie has been and is all smiles with a bunch typical promotional fluff.

Interview With Ryan Nicholson – Special Effects (SD, 3:31) – The man behind the only good thing about this film talks about his approach to the film.

Making Of (SD, 17:26) – All these interviews you watched before prove to be a waste of time because they are word for word repeated in this piece.  It also includes behind the scenes videos, which is primarily made up of the special effects people working on stuff in the RV.

Summary 

Ugh…no, I’m not recommending this at all as a film.  Its trash.  Kinda telling how new this film is and it already has gone by 2 other titles before this one; Seed 2 and Seed 2: The New Breed.  It feels as if some 13 year old boy saw the original Seed and decided to write a sequel and then some dumb bastard made it.  The film is incredibly immature and juvenile.  It doesn’t make a lick of sense and there’s no enjoyment from it on a primitive exploitation level.  This DVD gives an average presentation with a snoozer bit of extras.