John Bennett (James Congdon of The Rockford Files!) and his pretty wife Ellen (Katharine Houghton of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner) are a well to do couple who like to enjoy life on the tropical island where the live. They own a massive house, party with their socialite friends, and employ a few of the locals as hired help around the house. When one of their friends impresses Ellen with her fantastic garden, Ellen jumps at the chance to hire her hunky gardener, Carl (Warhol favorite Joe Dallesandro of Heat and Trash), and her husband, who is so wrapped up in his business affairs that he isn't really paying attention when he should be, doesn't seem to mind footing the bill.

When Carl arrives at the Bennett home he starts things off rather strangely, insisting that he work alone and refusing to affiliate with any of the other help around the house. His results speak for themselves, however, as despite his strange ways, Ellen's garden is soon in full bloom and the house full of all manner of beautiful and exotic flowers. So impressive is the garden that even a member of the local horticultural society admits that she is suitably impressed by Carl's work. Ellen's maid insists that there's something sinister about Carl, suggesting that he might be using black magic in his work but Ellen laughs it off as local superstition.

Things get a little more tense when Ellen starts to have feelings for Carl, who seems happy enough to let her act on them when the time is right. Fighting her instincts proves to be difficult and once she starts to resist the gardener's charms, her world all of a sudden gets a lot stranger and it all seems to be stemming, no pun intended, from the gardener and his flowers.

The Gardener, better known under its home video release title Seeds Of Evil, is an odd film. While the cover art makes it looks like a monster movie, it really works better as a sort of creeping dramatic thriller with some odd supernatural over tones. Don't go into this one expecting stalk and kill slasher movie set pieces or monster run amuck mayhem, as there's really only a couple of set pieces in the film and the ones that are there are not going to impress the gore-hound crowd. There's very little bloodshed, next to no nudity save for Dallesandro's backside which pops up a few times, and the movie relies more on a very strange atmosphere to function more so than any more traditional exploitative elements that we might expect from a seventies horror film.

The three leads of Dallesandro, Haughton and Congdon make for an interesting cast. Dallesandro has never been strong at delivering dialogue and the filmmaker's wisely give him little to say in this movie instead letting his body language do all the work and in that regard he does fine. When he creeps up behind a character or pops out from behind some flowers, it's obvious why Ellen starts to obsess over him but he's still able to give off some menace that serves as some effective foreshadowing of what is to come later on in the picture. Congdon, conflicted as the concerned husband who really only becomes concerned when he thinks his wife might be having an affair, is cocky and confident and while he'll always be known as Jim Rockford to most of us, he does fine with the material here, playing off Houghton's distressed performance well. No one is going to 'wow' you here, but each of the main cast members turn in what could definitely be called solid performances.

The real reason to check out the movie, however, is the atmosphere. To be blunt, not a whole lot happens in The Gardener until the last twenty minutes or so and even then the ending and the big finale is more odd than it is frightening but the movie does have a lot of atmosphere which somehow manages to make the movie interesting even when it technically shouldn't be from a storytelling standpoint. There's enough shadowy spots and weird flowers throughout the movie that it does manage to prove to be just unsettling enough to hold your attention, even if it is far from horrifying. In the end, what you have is a movie that should really be boring but somehow works in spite of itself, thanks more to some solid cinematography and a strange performance from Dallesandro than anything else.

Subversive has done a fine job on this 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer culled from the film's original negative. In most of the scenes colors jump off of the screen at you (though there are a few that look a bit on the flat side, possibly due to the lighting), the lighting hues used in various scenes look rich and atmospheric especially in some of the creepier moments that take place in the garden, and the black levels stay strong throughout. In terms of print damage there is the odd speck or scratch here and there but by and large, aside from the normal amount of expected film grain, the picture is very, very clean looking. As far as digital issues go, there aren't many mpeg compression artifacts to note (you might see some really mild ones in a couple of the darker spots) but there is some mild line shimmering in a couple of spots. Thankfully it doesn't prove to be too disturbing or disruptive at all. Overall, this is a very detailed, very clean and surprisingly excellent transfer for a low budget film.