[7]

Julie Christie is trapped inside a house run by a super-computer called Proteus IV that wants to have a baby with her. Yep, you heard me. Demon Seed, based on the book by Dean Koontz, is mostly a one-woman show, with Christie running here and there, being captured and tormented by Proteus IV, which manifests itself as a disembodied voice (an uncredited Robert Vaughn), security cameras in every room, and a motorized wheelchair with a robotic arm. Later on, the robot manifests in other ways — some pretty cool by 1977 practical effects standards. Proteus IV basically rapes Christie a time or two, forcing her to carry his ‘synthetic spermatazoa’. Whether it’s through shere exhaustion or maternal instinct, Christie’s character eventually look forward to the baby’s birth… but what will the baby be? Demon Seed is a moderately entertaining claustrophobic sci-fi horror film. And with Google, Siri, Alexa, and other disembodied computers given more and more control of our lives and households, perhaps not completely outside the realm of future possibility!