These old films about computers (see also WarGames) are amazing. They never manage to get computers right, do they? They just assume that computers in the future will get bigger, have more flashing lights, still be using floppy disks, and yet will have amazing artificial intellegence. Presumably squeezed into 16K of RAM.
Demon Seed is about one of these computers. One with its own brain, and tasked with things such as finding places to drill for oil, predicting the stock market, and coming up cures for nasty diseases. Unfortunately for the recently-separated wife of Alex, its creator, it gains actual sentience and decides it doesn’t want to be confined to a box, instead spreading out to the wife Susan’s house, and taking over its already clever home-help computer.
Proteus IV, the computer, then sets about studying Susan both psychologically and (increasingly invasively) physically. Preventing her escape, it reveals its plan to have a child with her.
Some parts of the film are a bit slow moving, and there are holes in the way in which Susan is supposedly imprisoned, as escape should have been much more simple. And nobody wonders where the geek who comes to rescue her disappeared to? And where did his car vanish to when others came to the house?
Besides that, and the lack of anything scary at all (not even any make-you-jump moments), as well as the ooooh computery warpy lights “simulations”, it was pretty entertaining. If a little disturbing when I realised that Robert Vaughn was providing the voice of Proteus.
Verdict: 3/5
Keep meaning to read Dean Koontz original book on which it was based which is written from the perspective of Susan and version he wrote in 1997 which is written from the perspective of Proteus IV