Demon Seed

Directed by Donald Cammell.  Written by Robert Jaffe and Roger O. Hirson.  Stars Julie Christie, Fritz Weaver.
1977, 94 minutes, Color, Rated R.

DEMON SEED is an odd mixture of science fiction art film and exploitation film.  It was directed by the co-director of PERFORMANCE and while dated by the technology shown on screen, the concept of artificial intelligence in day to day life is solid and still resonates.  The story concerns a computer system that achieves sentience and desires to become truly alive. It decides to do this by impregnating Julie Christie, whom it has imprisoned in her automated house.  The film is intelligent and well acted, but ultimately is a little disappointing. 

The film is a definite improvement over the source novel, which was downright smutty.  I'm talking about the original novel, not the much tamer rewrite Koontz did years later.  The original book is a torid little thing, the movie is decidedly more tasteful but also somewhat less harrowing.  The very, very early computer graphics are interesting, though overused in a 2001 kind of way at the end.  

I had tried to watch this many moons ago on VHS, but gave up because the panning and scanning was too distracting.  The film was photographed in Panavision and uses the wide frame effectively enough that things are much too cramped when presented full-frame.*The DVD features a very good transfer and mono sound.  Warner Archive eventually issued a great Blu-Ray edition.

* "Full frame" doesn't mean what it used to, of course.  The film's aspect ratio is 2.35:1, or the areas between the black bars in the screen captures above.  When I say full frame, I mean in this case 1.33:1 which was the aspect ratio of non-high definition TV's.  Nowadays, "full frame" could just as accurately mean 1.78:1, which is the aspect ratio of HDTV.