Alien Seed: D

Welcome to B-movie Heaven! Alien Seed is one of the most low budget pieces of garbage I have ever seen but it is so fun to watch.

“So bad it’s good” is a thing now, and I agree that it is a legitimate concept, but it is totally subjective. What I think is bad-good, someone else might think is bad-bad and vice versa. All you can do is make your case, so disagree if you want, but to me, this movie is 24 karat bad-good.

This was the first time I watched a movie and organically experienced the “so bad it’s good” phenomenon. This was probably circa 1997, so video stores and Fangoria were the only way you found out about stuff like this. There was no “buzz” about Alien Seed; watching bad movies was relegated to nerds (like me) who laughed at MST3K. There was no mainstream adoration of crap like this. We were living in a pre-Sharknado age when then SciFi channel played shitty movies for people to watch unironically.

If I sound like a hipster (“I liked garbage before it was cool!”), that’s not my point. I just want to emphasize the special place this movie has in my heart because I found it with all the same likelihood you’d find treasure at a landfill. My love for how cheap and awful Alien Seed is was ahead of its time, so I can never forget it.

Extraterrestrials get the brilliant idea to inseminate some random woman with their “Alien Seed” in the hopes that her hybrid offspring will trigger a doomsday (or second coming, depending on how you look at it) on Earth. A reporter named Timmons, played by this guy who is a worse actor than a mannequin on a skateboard, somehow figures out what’s happening and takes it upon himself to be the woman’s protector a la Kyle Reese from Terminator. The guy can’t even deliver his fucking terribly written lines correctly when he arrives at the woman’s apartment with Chinese food.

Knock-knock-knock.
“Who is it?”
“Take-out.”
“I didn’t order any.”
Timmons aggressively storms into her apartment.
“I did.”

This exchange is so wretched and miserable that the first time I saw it, it became an inside joke with my friends and me for over a year. He looks like Steve Blackman on estrogen supplements.

Amid all this exciting Chinese food eating and not-acting, along comes Erik Estrada, a mad scientist who also figures out the Alien Seed situation. He concocts a plan to kidnap the woman, harvest the alien-baby for his own twisted agenda, torture / reveal his plan to Timmons, and laugh a lot. Check it out: Erik Estrada is the best actor in the film! Next to Timmons, he looks like Sir Antony Hopkins.

A B-movie cat and mouse game ensues. There is a deplorable car chase that is full of bloopers and sped-up footage and no special effects beyond that. There is no alien action because, face it, they couldn’t even afford a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers level of alien make-up.

I had a hard time figuring out when the movie was taking itself seriously (if ever) and when it was embracing the stench of its own schlock. The fact that there is a shred of question here should be a testament to Estrada’s acting. If you are in the mood for everything ugly from the 80s and sub-Dolamite production, here’s your bad-good diamond in the rough.