You ever have that one horror movie when you were a kid that you thought was the scariest thing ever even when everyone thought it was dumb, and it probably wasn’t until your teens that you realized why it was dumb? Well for me Seedpeople is that movie.

The movie itself despite claiming to be “based on an original idea” seems to copy from pretty much every evil plant from space movie from the 50’s and 60’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Day of The Triffids, and It Counqured The World, as well as every “guy goes back to his old home town finds out ancient evil alien force landed there, and he has to stop it from taking over world” story, and just a dash of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Long story short a state geologist named Tom Baines goes to his old home town of Comet Valley so named because legend has it a comet landed there to do a study on how he believes the comet was actually a meteor, and it’s still there with many of townsfolk believing they found pieces of the meteor.

Tom also stays at his ex girlfriend Heidi’s bed and breakfast where he has to deal with her new boyfriend who’s also the town sheriff, as well as Heidi’s niece who’s paranoid about the housekeeper, and later her father not being who or what they appear to be, and a crazy scientist named Doc Roller who’s paranoid about everyone in town.

Little does Tom or anyone else know that the meteorites aren’t meteorites but seeds to an evil alien plant that grows into these weird dandelion/tree hybrids that spray people with pollen causing them to come out as the film’s titular multi eyed fanged plant creatures.

Not only that but humans who have been turned into alien plant creatures are digging up the rest of the alien seeds so that the alien plants can grow all over the world.

The thing about Seedpeople is that it has some interesting ideas, and the monsters themselves look pretty creepy, and it tries to take it’s story seriously but at the same time the story moves at the pace of it’s monsters which is slow, most of it’s scariest moments happen early in the movie not to mention a gazillion plot holes.

For instance it’s explained that the monster’s weakness is UV radiation yet they move around in daytime even in monster form just fine, and it seems kind of strange for plant creatures to be hurt by sunlight since most plants need it to survive.

Also what happens to the extra mass of the people when they become Seedpeople since some are relatively thin people, and relatively fat as plant monsters but one of them is pretty fat as a human, and quite small as a plant monster.

Not to mention one of them has the ability to give people wet willies, and make them work for the aliens but it never explains if it turns them into plant monsters as well, and we just don’t see their plant monster forms or if it just controls them.

It also get’s to the point where the movie resorts to giving us these facts about plants to explain why evil plants from space would be scary.

I suspect that a lot of the film’s problems stem (pardon the pun) from it’s idea was bigger than it’s budget, and that a similar movie or even a straight sequel or remake with a bigger budget might do better.

All in all if you’ll pardon the pun there’s the seed of good idea here but it never grows beyond other cheesy late 80’s early 90’s DTV horror movies.

Til then don’t poke any strange plants you see.