Following his U.S. Army service and combat experience in the Vietnam War, an aspiring young filmmaker named Oliver Stone graduated from NYU film school and managed to get his first theatrical feature financed, produced, and granted a limited release. That’s an extremely impressive achievement for anyone to attain by the age of just 28-years-old, even if the resulting movie, a low-budget horror thriller called Seizure, turned out to be a terrible mess that Stone has undoubtedly omitted from his résumé for the majority of his career.
On the one hand, I can hardly fault a future three-time Oscar-winning writer/director for churning out a crappy horror flick just for the experience of getting something made. Lord knows, I would’ve happily done the same had I been as motivated, or as talented, when I came out of film school myself a couple decades later. (Sadly, I was neither.) On the other hand, as a viewer – even a fan – trying to sit through Seizure today is pretty painful. I also can’t help but measure this early work against what Stone’s contemporary Steven Spielberg would achieve just seven months later, and at the same age. That comparison is quite unflattering, to put it mildly.
| Title: | Seizure |
| Year of Release: | 1974 |
| Director: | Oliver Stone |
| Watched On: | Amazon Prime Video (rental) |
| Also Available On: | Blu-ray DVD |
The story follows an author named Edmund Blackstone (Jonathan Frid, famous for playing the moody vampire Barnabas Collins in the TV soap Dark Shadows), who struggles to get through a bout of writer’s block by inviting a group of friends to stay at his home on a lake. Most of these supposed friends are obnoxious jackasses even Edmund himself can hardly bear, and why he’d want to see them all together at one time is a mystery never addressed. Over the course of their weekend, the group find themselves terrorized by a trio of mysterious, possibly supernatural strangers – a witch, a strongman in a leather gimp outfit, and a dwarf – that Edmund himself believes have sprung into reality from nightmares he’d been having about them.
That short summary is more coherent than anything in the movie itself, and frankly the plot isn’t worth elaborating further. Seizure amounts to a super low-budget home invasion thriller with lousy production values, silly costumes, often pretentious dialogue, and soap opera-level acting. Made in a transitional period where Oliver Stone was still caught in the throes of PTSD and drug addiction after his time in Vietnam, the movie exhibits virtually no signs of the talents as either writer or director he would blossom into later.
Aside from Frid, the main other notable players in the cast include former teen heartthrob Troy Donahue (A Summer Place, Monster on the Campus), Bond Girl and prehistoric vixen Martine Beswick (From Russia with Love, One Million Years B.C.), and soon-to-be cult movie breakout starlet Mary Woronov (Death Race 2000, Eating Raoul). The latter two names are primarily known to me through frequent mentions in Video Watchdog magazine. Edmund’s wife is also played by an actress with the delightful name Christina Pickles (much later, Ross’ mom in Friends).
For most viewers watching in retrospect, the most famous face to appear on screen will be Hervé Villechaize, who’d shoot to fame one month after this movie’s release as the henchman Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun and then sustain six seasons on television in Fantasy Island. Here, he plays what is supposed to be the most threatening and fearsome of the intruders – a conceit that presupposes the rather dumb (not to mention prejudiced) notion that dwarfs are inherently evil and terrifying. Villechaize also served as the production’s official still photographer, which explains why most available publicity photos from the movie were taken from a low angle.
The film’s title, Seizure, is misleading and ultimately meaningless. Nobody in the movie ever has a seizure, even with a generous interpretation of the lame plot-twist ending as turning the whole story into Edmund’s death dream after presumably suffering one. That’s just not what a seizure is nor how one works. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about here. Nor should you care that I’ve just spoiled the ending for you. In fact, you might even thank me for sparing you the 94 interminable minutes of waiting for it yourself.
Oliver Stone would, obviously, go on to better things than this. Depending on your perspective, perhaps he’d go on to a few worse as well, though I doubt many would fault Platoon or Born on the 4th of July. That copies of Seizure still exist and have any sort of distribution or availability today is purely a factor of his fame. There’s no reason to watch it other than for a glimpse of how Stone got his humble start in filmmaking. Even to that end, this one’s quite a chore to get through.
Video Streaming
Scorpion Releasing brought Seizure to both DVD and Blu-ray in 2014. I don’t own either disc and am certainly not inclined to buy one. For the purposes of this review, I decided that streaming would be fine. Unfortunately, the only place the movie is currently streaming is via a paid rental from Amazon Prime Video. Although listed as “HD,” the streaming copy is absolutely nothing of the sort. Not only is the video clearly Standard Definition, it looks about VHS quality.
Seizure technically had a theatrical release in 1974, albeit not much of one. The film would have been projected at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 at that time. The video transfer used for streaming is close enough at full-screen 16:9. If anything, the framing still occasionally looks a little too tight at the top of the screen. Picture quality otherwise is nearly unwatchable. The image is blurry to the point of causing eye strain, and filled with sloppy compression artifacts.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 mono soundtrack is only marginally better than the video. Dialogue in the track is overly loud and has a very bright, harsh character.
I can’t imagine anyone other than Oliver Stone completist super-fans wanting to own a permanent copy of this movie. For that niche audience, I might hope that the Blu-ray would look and/or sound better. A couple reviews I searched on competitor sites suggest that the disc is at least passable, which leaves me wondering how Amazon got struck streaming such a crappy copy and trying to pass it off as HD.
Related
- Oliver Stone (director)
- Martine Beswick
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