Andy Milligan co-wrote, directed, shot, and did the costumes for this grimly effective exploitation feature. It stars Maggie Rogers as Claris Manning, a vile and hateful bitch if ever there was one. Now her grown-up children are all putrid and hateful in their own ways, and she's convinced (probably not incorrectly) that they're waiting and waiting for her to drop dead so her fortune will become available to them. The old lady's daughter Carol (Candy Hammond, whom Milligan married during filming) invites the ugly brood over for a Christmas dinner, and things turn ugly in more ways than one. Some of the family members start dying off in various ways.

"Seeds" is one of those trash flicks that makes up for in spirit what it may lack in technical polish. It may indeed be "rough around the edges", but Milligan and his co-writer John Borske concocted a wonderfully sordid story and wonderfully sordid characters here. It's all compelling in a really twisted way, especially since incest is a theme that recurs throughout. And because so many of the characters are despicable (including house staff that have their own scheme in the works),we're only too happy to see these people bumped off.

There isn't that much in the way of graphic violence, but exploitation devotees will be delighted to note the abundant nudity and sex. The lack of a big budget helps to create a truly depraved and, well, seedy atmosphere. There are very few settings used, with most of the action confined to the house.

The dialogue is often very amusing, and better than one might expect, and the same goes for the performances. Rogers, in particular, is memorably hideous as one of the nastiest mothers in screen history.

As some people likely already know, this is also available in an alternate cut, "Seeds of Sin", which trims out a lot of Milligans' original material and adds new sex scenes with different actors, in an attempt to increase the pictures' possible revenue.

This could make for interesting alternative Christmas time viewing for more adventuresome movie lovers.

Eight out of 10.

A HEAVILY dysfunctional family gets together for the holidays. This leads to multiple murders (all badly done) and quite a few sex inserts that feature none of the original cast! This was originally shot as a straight-forward exploitation film with little skin. The producers saw it and decided to change it. They cut out key scenes that explained the plot, inserted some seriously terrible music that occasionally drowns out the actors dialogue, inserted some soft core sex scenes (seemingly at random) with two people who aren't even in the movie! They turned what MIGHT have been an OK movie into an incomprehensible mess. Still the script (or what's left of it) isn't bad, the acting is pretty good (even though some actors REALLY chew the scenery) and a lot of dramatic sequences really work. However the sex scenes the producers inserted pop up all over the place and go on for up to 5 minutes! The two actors (a guy and a girl) ARE attractive and have nice bodies so they're not a chore the watch...but their scenes totally destroy the flow of the story. So what's left is what might have been a pretty good film destroyed by editing and inserting pointless sex. A 3.

A rotten dysfunctional family of bitter, bickering, back-stabbing folks gather together to celebrate Christmas. The reunion naturally sets everybody against each other as everyone's worst secrets are exposed. The situation comes to a deadly head when a mysterious killer starts bumping people off.

Notorious Do-It-Your indie exploitation filmmaker Andy Milligan lets his trademark misanthropy and debauchery run rampant in this movie: Leave it to Milligan to populate the seamy story with a rich array of horrible individuals who include a nasty crippled alcoholic matriarch (played with unsparing harshness by Maggie Rogers),a brother and sister who had an incestuous affair as kids, a shady overcharging doctor, a hypocritical pedophile priest (an excellent performance by Neil Flanagan),a pair of scheming live-in servants, a pathetic homosexual, a snarky stuck-up blonde, and a brazen strumpet. Milligan captures the anguish and suffering of these colorfully awful characters with such merciless acuity that in a way it's a relief that the bulk of them meet brutal untimely ends. Moreover, Milligan tosses in a handy helping of gratuitous female nudity and sordid soft-core sex for sleazy good measure. A deliciously depraved doozy.