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Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely Fantastic

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Gardener is a 70s Horror Film starring Joe Dallesandro as the title character, a gardener with evil powers. More importantly, gardener who never wears a shirt with evil powers. Excited yet? The movie is very pretty, filmed in Puerto Rico. Very gorgeous shots of various flowers and our title character fill the movie. It's not very believable that Carl - The Gardener - can manipulate the flowers to drive his employers and friends crazy, and that's mostly because it isn't really explained. It just happens, and they expect us to believe it because the evidence is there. He comes, he goes, they go crazy. I want to say that this movie was made to exploit the young actor (at least young at the time), but he's never really explored. He has some exploitive scenes, like when he skinny dips and seduces various female characters, but he's really not "fleshed" out. LoL. Flesh. Our main character Ellen (played by Katherine Hepburn's niece Katharine Houghton) gets most of the screen time and she falls prey to Carl's powers of manipulation. The flowers in the house start to affect her other servants, her husband, and her best friend, who just wants to bed him. (Rita Glam, stealing every scene she's in) I obviously wanted to watch the movie for some eye candy, and I kinda' get it. Joe Dallesandro as Carl struts around the movie in nothing but a pair of tight camel skin pants. We get a butt shot and some ab shots, but nothing that I can't see on an episode of Desperate Housewives or Weeds. Still, the acting of our two main actresses, (playing the typical main character and main character's horny friend that pollutes so many other films) rises above B movie status and they take the ridiculous script so seriously that it elicits some unnecessary laughter throughout. Worth a watch for cult movie fans, and gay people, but don't expect too much. Just some flesh, flowers and HORROR!!!! heheh.Check out my Movie Blog:http://neonboy619.blogspot.com

Where to begin? I bought this in a double feature with the cheesy but entertaining Freakmaker, with Donald Pleasance, and wasn't expecting too much. Even though I went into this film with very low expectations - they weren't met. This flick plays like a housewife's fantasy with a Fabio looking dude (Dallesandro) tending to Houghton's garden. He spends the entire film topless while the visiting females of the area gawk at the stud.The movie is poorly directed - the scenes do not effectively blend with one another. The scenes seem to be cut and pasted, like a sketch show, with no continuity. And the dialog! Lord have mercy! When Houghton's husband laments to his pal at the golf course about the stud gardener at his house, his friend tells him, "as long as your garden looks fine and your wife is happy, why worry?" Yeah, his wife is happy alright! With the flowers and with the strapping hunk mulching her flowerbed.STORY: $$ (This has an interesting plot, with a mysterious gardener who brings flowers to bloom out of season. Houghton's Hispanic maid warns her that Dallesandro might be a witch - or warlock for you perfectionists out there - but she believes her maid to be crazy. However, the back story for Dallesandro's character isn't well developed and there isn't any character building before we plunge right into the plot).ACTING: $ (Terrible on most accounts. Rita Gam and Congdon do fine in supporting roles but the leads aren't very talented. Houghton's naive housewife character is a test in endurance. She is a poor lead. As for Dallesandro, he does little beyond flexing for the ladies. He makes Ah'nold seem like Cary Grant).VIOLENCE: $$ (Houghton hacks Rita Gam's hand with a gardening blade when Rita is engulfed in vines. Dallesandro also gets shot and we have a semi-mutilated cat in the garden. Quite a bit a violence for what is essentially a Lifetime Channel female fantasy).NUDITY: $$ (You get Dallesandro's bare backside on a few occasions).

I picked this movie up in the USED section at my local Record shop and I have to say, by the cover artwork and synopsis on the back, I was excited to take it home and pop it in. The whole project is really well-done in that way. But that's about it. The film was very 70's, which for me, is a good thing. For most viewers though, this would prove to be a cheesy example of an era that might be better off forgotten. The music is pretty bad and so are the clothes. It's not stylish, its like the Brady Bunch.There is no good gore in this movie. The acting is decent and the guy who plays "The Gardener" is semi-creepy, but the plot just fails. It's not scary in the least bit and the only good scene in the film is the very last one.I had high hopes, I really did. I wanted to like it more, and I still do. I've watched it three times now and I still fail to see how this is a horror movie. It's more like an off-beat romantic drama with a twist. If I had to compare it to something else, I'd say a mix between "Rosemary's Baby," "Play Misty for Me," and "Alice in Wonderland" (the live one) but not as good as any of those films.4 out of 10, kids.

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.