A Semente do Mal
Fuck yeah, a proper horror film made in Portugal. Just a bit on the nose, as our boy is called Edward Ipus. Ed Ipus, geddit?
Our boy might be the focus of the story, the trigger that moves the plot along, but the hero is her young lover, one of the new Bill and Ted children.
That’s for later. The film opens with a young mother feeding her babies, while two people lurk in the shadows and steal the babies! Only the woman manages to escape, while the guy vanishes.
After about 30 years, our boy Ed Ipus wants to find his family, so registers in one of those 23andme sites and gets a 100% match in Portugal. They just have to visit now, it’s his long lost family. Not a good sign the people selling fruit by the roadside are very rude once they notice they will visit Amelia’s house.
At first everything goes well, his twin brother is less sophisticated than New Yorkers, but it’s good to get away sometimes. Then they meet their mothers, that’s where everything goes to shit. She’s a deformed ghoul, an old woman straight out of Escape From LA, and starts acting weird around the girlfriend. The boy gives them the benefit of the doubt, since he is so excited to meet his family at last.
Our hero starts digging around and her suspicious increase. Mother and son sleep together and talk dirty on the bedroom, there are legends and rumours of a witch who feeds on her own incestuous children to remain young, their father is not mentioned anywhere.
As our hero gets more and more creeped out, the hosts get more and more aggressive. She meets the woman by the roadside once more and she mentions her daughter was the baby kidnapper. Once proof of their incestuous relationship comes to light, our hero wants out, but our boy is enthralled by his new family (by chemical means too). This culminates in the old crone using her charming skills to disguise as his Boyfriend and impregnate herself, against his wishes.
By this point, our hero goes ballistic and attempts to murder the son, but his mother attacks, strongly. She only escapes when the old father jumps out of the basement and gets killed by her, giving our young couple time to escape. It is unclear if anyone dies in the home…
Putting Rita Blanco on the marketing then making her a cameo, classic big boy moves. There’s also a lot of hidden CGI, something the director confirmed.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.