The cycle of Jack Ketchum movie adaptations runs aground with this sometimes shockingly poor flick adapted by Ketchum himself from his novel sequel to the superior The Off Season. From its gruesome opening discovery, its clear that the Maine-coast-set movie is not going to dilute the kind of in-your-face gore for which Ketchum has become known, but sadly the director of the interesting HEADSPACE has done an amateurish job with this grisly material.
The basic set-up riffs on THE HILLS HAVE EYES and involves retired, hard drinking cop Art Hindle (also an associate producer) being dragged out of retirement when the brutal murder of a young babysitter by feral kids has strong parallels to an infamous earlier case he was embroiled with. Nearby, our hero sees a wild naked girl near his house and suspects a local hippy commune, unaware that she’s part of a bunch of brutish, self-harming descendants of an 18th century light-house keeper, whose hobbies include kidnapping babies and eating human flesh. Our heroines psycho-ex is in the area, she has a tasty morsel of a new born baby and her friend has an irritating 8 year old kid into the bargain.
The aforementioned friend, as whiney and unsympathetic as you could find in a horror movie this side of Franklin in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, forms part of perhaps the most hate-able bunch of good guys in recent horror cinema. You will end up rooting for the cannibal clan, whose extended un-subtitled bouts of dialogue endearingly recalls those old Hammer prehistoric flicks in which you would have to sit through a lot of grunting in order to enjoy the majesty of Martine Beswicke in a designer prehistoric bikini.
OFFSPRING is notable in quite a few ways, starting with the most inept police force conceivable : at one point, they apprehend a potential suspect, who escapes with ease into the woods – to be followed by a cop who begins chase before tumbling over like a disposable babe in a FRIDAY THE 13TH sequel. The uber-annoying 8 year old proves more capable of finding and dealing with the threat than these Keystone cops – who merely stand and WATCH his climactic tree-house axe-fight with a Wild Kid. Hindle looks miserable, his under-written part (and the abrupt fashion in which the premise is set up) reflective of the fact that this movie is based on a sequel to a novel that never got filmed. The dialogue is often hilariously bad, including a moment in which a cop, discovering a gruesomely ravaged corpse, laments >This was a really nice guy…”.
The movie is bizarrely paced, with no concept of suspense : scenes begin arbitrarily, with key characters being shot or finding themselves in the right place with no build-up or explanation. The ending comes off as a lame after-thought, the characters are thin as can be and some of the attack scenes and confrontations are so badly staged that unintentional laughter sets in (especially as the villains are largely silly looking).
Nonetheless, this occasionally terrible movie has its pleasures. There’s a visceral home invasion set piece featuring intestine pulling that’s a passably intense variation on the caravan-violation of HILLS. The film has some of the most savage violence of recent American horror, with feral kids getting shot in the head, eyeball poking, flagellation and a bravura cranial bisection thats capped by a shot of a cannibal girl sucking on the split-head.
Its a long way from representing quality movie-making but OFFSPRING is weirdly enjoyable for the way it (inadvertently) captures the look and feel of a good-but-bad video nasty, with its poor production values and extreme content. One sequence in particular, in which a pointy-toothed grinning weirdo bites down on a gratuitously naked woman’s vagina is as extreme as R-rated horror can surely get, and fairly typical of the movies enjoyably leery tone.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
