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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 27941
Released: October 4, 2005 |
| Our Price: $5.88 |
| Used Price: $5.48 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Susan Harris is alone in the house when, suddenly, doors lock, windows slam shut and the phone stops working. Susan is trapped by an intruder - but this is no ordinary thug. Instead, the intruder is a computer named Proteus, an artificial brain that has learned to reason. And to terrorize. In "one of her finest, most vulnerable perfromances" (Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic), Julie Christie plays Susan in this taut techno-thriller based on the Dean Koontz novel. Packed with suspense, surprise and special effects, Demon Seed follows Susan's desperate attempts to outmaneuver and outthink her captor. Then Susan learns what Proteus wants: its own child, conceived in her womb and destined for domination.
Description of Demon Seed:
One of the better examples of the mad-computer genre, Demon Seed is a sci-fi nightmare brimming with ideas. Julie Christie dominates the film as an unsuspecting woman whose house has been completely automated by her computer-genius husband (Fritz Weaver). He, in turn, has just completed Proteus, the world's smartest Artificial Intelligence machine. When Proteus traps Christie alone in the house, it--or he--has notions of passing his intellectual power to another generation... by impregnating her. One of the many intriguing things about Donald Cammell's film (based on a Dean Koontz yarn) is that Proteus's dreams are actually visionary and utopian, unlike the commercial uses planned for him by others. Of course, he's also scary as hell; the voice of Proteus, uncredited, unmistakably belongs to Robert Vaughn. Cammell, a fascinating and frustrated talent (he co-directed Performance), completed very few films and ultimately killed himself in 1996. Somewhere around the halfway point Demon Seed begins to break down dramatically and logically, yet it has so many ideas kicking around that it sticks in the mind anyway. A good Jerry Fielding score adds to the overall dread. --Robert Horton
Demon Seed Reviews:
A computer gets the hots for Julie ... 
2009-07-18 - I'm a diehard Julie Christie fan. I'm old enough to have seen the original when it first came out in 1977. On opening night, I was the very first person in the theater (which for the most part remained nearly empty, if I remember correctly after all these years). At the time, I was a gnurdy grad student at Urbana, one of the original supercomputer sites and one of the original sites that led to what was to become the Internet revolution. For fans of evil computers, by the way, Urbana was the birthplace of HAL.
Until last night, I haven't re-watched it, so it was a nostalgic trip for me. Adding to the overall tone of the movie was the violent thunderstorm that broke out while I was watching it. From the geeky side, I broke out laughing when I saw the then state-of-the-art 8 inch floppies. From the sexual fantasy side, a robotic arm tieing Julie up, an electric scissors cutting away her clothes, a probe coming at her ...need to stop here. There was a romantic, poetic side to the Proteus/Julie encounter, however. Movies are always filled with cliches representing orgasmic moments ... blowing curtains, crashing waves, hilarious imagery in Airplane. Here, we see exploding galaxies; the ultimate Big Bang (haha).
Whether this is a great movie or great sci-fi or great commentary on man/machine/environment interaction (it now appears ahead of its time on environmental concerns) is somewhat besides the point. This is a movie for Julie fans, since she is the sole human for 90+% of the film. Though she had long lost the youthful glow she had in Dr. Zhivago and the quiet beauty she had in Far from the Madding Crowd, she was still hot (a brief voyeuristic scene as Proteus ogles her as she steps out of the shower and looks herself over). Hey, she gets a computer worked up. Proteus's CPU was overclocking at 100% utilization, his RAM buffer was certainly full, and his hard drive (not floppy) was burning out its bearings revved up in overdrive. I can imagine the alarms at the NOC going off as the overtemp sensors kicked in; now that's an unexpected scenario for emergency cooling systems.
This DVD has been discontinued and is currently being sold off at bargain-basement clearance prices. Get `em while they're hot.
Disappointed 
2009-07-06 - I read the book first, and was disappointed in a few things. Mostly that Proteus is totally in love with her in the book, and is a straight up cold blooded killer in the movie version. Also, in the book Proteus was able to access multiple systems and had a human assistant that he broke out of an institution or jail. That dude was hard core in the book, and Proteus would get pissed when he got a boner from looking at Susan. His assistant killed Walter. Plus, the special effects were about as gay as you can get. Even for 1977.
Preview 
2009-06-10 - The programmer leaves his woman alone in the house with a terminal off the main frame computer in the basement. The computer has his way with her and is born. Wow a computer gets lucky!
great
2009-05-31 - This film was great it was well lighted and you could see what
was going on .
A (To the ((Needle)) Point) Review
2009-04-30 - If anyone cares to see a film that set a bar so high that few dared to parallel, I highly recommend "Demon Seed," from 1977.
Yes younglings, it's older than many of you and your parents, but this film not only made a computer a central part of the home in nearly every way, which is finally being realized these past few years, but the artificial intelligence went to far as to create an offspring of flesh an blood by artificially inseminating an unwilling subject.
Yes, there are no SUPER COOL graphics which will blow you away. Occasionally the pace of the editing makes you wonder when the next scene will been seen. And since it was made in 1977, the dialogue can be dated.
BUT...
After you peel away the layer of what you think you can expect, you will come to realize that "Demon Seed" crosses boundaries yet to be established. And if it doesn't leave you unsettled, then you too must be a computer!
