Demon Seed

There are a lot of valuable life lessons in this film. Never design an artificial intelligence that is smart enough to find a cure for leukemia in four days. If you do, never piss on its dreams. Failing those, you should never create a direct link from that AI to your fully robo-automated house. Where your wife is staying. Alone. Hell, back up a bit: never robo-automate your house. That's not gonna end well.

This film takes the mischevious HAL from 2001 and dumps him into Rosemary's Baby; his designer, a scientist at a government lab, learns all of the above lessons and more. The wife, trapped in the state-of-the-(70s)-art house, is tormented and measured (noooo!) until she submits to bearing the rogue computer's love child. Although any woman who can be seduced by a screensaver couldn't have put up too much of a fight.

The action takes place almost entirely in the house, and while the pace is a bit slow and the events a bit predictable (until the end, oddly enough), there are enough good scenes to keep watching. The top "Oh crap!" moment comes when the wife, after receiving an unexpected electrical shock and collapsing, wakes up on a table in the windowless (basement) lab with a robotic arm tying the last of her four limbs in place. What do you do now, MacGyver?

Worth seeing for the awkward dialogue ("You find me boring, my dear, but I find myself ... rather interesting") and disembodied voice of Robert Vaughn. Speaking as someone inured to tentacle hentai, though, I have to say the insemination scene was quite disappointing.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Demon Seed (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [**___]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [**___]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [****_]

Technology you probably forgot:
* gull-wing doors
* binocular surveillance cameras
* 5 1/4" floppies
* computer dust-covers
* Television tuning dials

What I would do different: Proteus would have had a child that would emerge from the womb to enslave all mankind, crushing all opposition to his golden tentacled genius.