Title: The Gardener: AKA Seeds of Evil What the hell?: Here is the Netflix description of Jim Kay's The Gardener:
A creepy gardener (Joe Dallesandro) who has the ability to turn himself into a tree spends his spare time feeding his plants human flesh -- which only makes them crave the taste of blood. Obsessed with a beautiful woman who resists his affections, he sends her a bouquet of his people-eating posies and lets his bloodthirsty blooms do the dirty work.
Wow! That sounds awesome! Let me tell you about the movie that I watched, which was presumably Jim Kay's The Gardener:
A creepy gardener (Joe Dallesandro) who can kind of turn himself into a tree and does so once right before the closing credits, is hired by a mousy married lady living in a nondescript Latin country to improve the status of her garden. He cultivates some weird plants , but he never feeds any of them human flesh...at least not on camera (nor is it even hinted at by anyone ever). He does send a bouquet of flowers to a woman in the hospital. Whether or not they are blood-thirsty there is no way to tell. They do asphyxiate her. Oh, this movie is dumb.
What's to like: a delightfully schmaltzy musical score; a running time of 1 hour and 20 minutes.What's to not like: the worst acting this side of a community theater production of Once Upon a Mattress; an inaccurate Netflix description that made this movie sound halfway decent.
The truth: Poor Carl! He has no people skills, men tend to dislike him because of his rugged good looks, and he can't seem to find his shirt. Also he may or may not be a witch doctor who teaches plants to kill. What I do know is that he can sort of turn himself into a tree, which in the end doesn't really help him out that much. Let me set the scene: Ellen Bennett (our hero, I guess?) has finally discovered that Carl is creepy and weird (something the rest of us figure out the first time he lumbers onto screen and passionlessly delivers his first lines of dialogue) and possibly murdering people, so she has decided to pump him full of lead. Even after three bullets the shirtless gardener is unharmed, in fact, he is energized enough to start his final tree transformation. After becoming a tree, Ellen promptly covers him in gas and sets him on fire. So, is having the power to become a tree really all that beneficial? I think Carl would even say no.
Total crap!
Next time: Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People
Then we wrap this blessing up and declare a winner! Be there!
