The Gardener (1974)

Wonderful Movie

Sorry, this movie sucks

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Warhol entourage beefcake Joe Dallessandro portrays Karl, a gardener in the employment of a wealthy but neglected housewife(Katharine Houghton, miles downstream from her earlier success in GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER). His command of the botanical arts is impressive, but his references are tough to check considering most of his previous employers have died. Suspiciously.Houghton's garden is soon the envy of her upper-crust clique, and her reserved and perpetually bare-chested gardener becomes the object of much lustful flutter among her female friends. The rest of the household staff(natives to the South American environs where this is set and filmed) are less enthusiastic about Karl's presence, and they warn their housemistress of his evil wizardry. Shrugging off this superstitious cautioning, she becomes increasingly drawn to Karl...but when people around her begin to die mysteriously, she comes to suspect a tenebrous connection to the flora cultivated by her brooding and sexually Svengali-like greenskeeper. The bizarre eventuality of this mystery is the manifestation of Karl's true nature. It seems he is...quite literally...a tree.While THE GARDENER is a semi-creditable example of an under-the-radar horror film ethos, it's not likely to have strong appeal to the mainstream viewing integer. Sluggishly paced and lacking 'comme il faut' shocks and bloodshed, it does otherwise manage to build an obfuscous atmosphere of weblike mystique.A mellow horror high for some, probably a harsh toke for others...5/10

SEEDS OF EVIL is one obscure film and the better for it. I love watching films that have been, for whatever reasons, forgotten or simply dismissed with time. Watching them always brings a special kind of feeling: that your watching something few people have seen. On rare occasions I "discovered" a couple of hidden gems by doing this. But most of the time there's a good reason why so many films are forgotten: they're just not good on any level.SEEDS OF EVIL is one of those obscure films people have forgotten and though it's not a true hidden gem, it's a real find nonetheless. There's something unique about it which I've rarely seen in any film I've seen up to now: it basically creates a new genre, of the psychic connections between plants and humans and the potential for evil. It's forward thinking enough to be seen as contemporary and yet the film has a quaint charm to it which reminds me of movies of the past.Though made in 1975, SEEDS OF EVIL is decidedly straddled between the films of sex and gore of the 1970s and the spooky, non-violent horror films made just a decade ago (like THE HAUNTING or THE INNOCENTS). The sex is provided in the form of Joe Dallesandro, who's shirtless and wearing barely there hip-huggers, or just plain naked throughout the movie. And the quaintness is mainly due to the fact that there's little violence in SOE and the soundtrack is very flowery and has that "whoo-hoo-hooo" kinda of feel to it, which is probably more suited for a horror film of the 1950s or 60s than one from the 1970s.The direction is not bad. The camera glides around smoothly. The film is never boring even though nothing much really happens in the movie. The 1970s fashion and interiors are a sight to behold. The acting is surprisingly good for this kind of film, with Rita Gam stealing the show. The exception being Joe Dallesandro. Joe is one bad actor. So much so that the director consciously avoided having Dallesandro acting on screen for extended periods of time. Dallesandro, with his compact and sculptured body, was simply used as "special effects" for the film. And the genre (psychic attachment to plants, also explored in THE KIRLIAN WITNESS in 1978) is an interesting one and though not 100% successful here, it does bring a fresh outlook to where evil might lurk.Anyone looking for gore or violence, or female nudity will be sorely disappointed with SOE. But for fans of obscure films, even though there's nothing earth-shattering about it, SEEDS OF EVIL is a nifty little find.

Katherine Hepburn's niece, Andy Warhol's biggest superstar, and a plot right out of Dario Argento...sounds great? It's not. Unfortunately SEEDS OF EVIL aka GARDEN OF EVIL aka THE GARDENER is extremely boring. While well mounted and with dialog that's not altogether horrendous, the movie never gets going. Katherine Houghton is a well to do American living in the tropics with her wealthy husband. She hires mysterious gardener Joe Dallesandro and soon has the most envied garden imaginable. It turns out that Dallesandro, who wears skin-tight hip-huggers and no shirt, has a history of working for employers who are now dead. We never see any of their deaths, instead we get Houghton uncovering them via phone calls and visits to the dead's survivors. For some reason, the writer/director of this botched horror film forgot to include any horror at all! Houghton is pretty good and seems to be taking the film very seriously and Dallesandro, who has virtually no lines, manages to remain as enigmatic as he's been in his Warhol/Morrisey films. Rita Gam plays Houghton's catty and ultimately unlucky jet-setting best friend.

So you are in this movie-rental place with a horror section that is just miles wide and furlongs in length, and you are, just imagine, scanning the rows for anything that catches your rather jaded (maybe from too many low-budget or low-brow horror flicks, too much mockery, or stilted dialogue, too many effects or musical stings) eye in that special way that only a truly mongoloid flick can do--and what do you see? of course, a really chintzy colored pencil and pastel picture of this tree/man graft that has women trapped (mayhaps metaphorically) in his "roots," but the really bad part is the complete physiological inaccuracy of the picture (witness, in your mind's eye, the nipples of this bare-chested "evil" tree/man placed in the exact (okay, semi-exact) orthocenter of his pectoral muscles--just plain zaniness from look one!), and it has this tag on it that reads, "He does bad things to them...in the Garden!!" and what can you do or say (except fall in love with it on the spot and say "I love you," respectively associated, right there in the orchard of neon horror that is the movie rental place)--and then so imagine your heartbreak when you get home, undress it from its plastic case and discover to yourself the fact that it is completely: affectless, toneless, actionless, heartless, penniless, paceless, plotless, heartless, and, perhaps most horribly, humorless--you and your best bud cannot, for the glory that the world holds, come up with a single joke to combat the ceaseless waves of offense to your senses and sensibilities that this offers--not to mention devoid of a) evil and b)seeds of said evil...there are no effects: it features untold minutes of floral footage, which cause the actors to expire at completely surreal and random moments--with which occasional happening you can utterly sympathize...I went looking for a movie too bad to be believed, and I found it. It broke my heart. It has the power to tear yours out and lay it bleeding on the table before you, and it won't even give you a maniacal chuckle to which to expire. This is the worst movie I have ever seen with maybe the sole exception of "'Manos':The Hands of Fate." But, hey, you're the one in the horror section--you roll the dice.