Offspring (2009)

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The DVD box cover for "Offspring" brandishes 'brutal... gruesome... shocking'. I wonder if whomever at horror.com who wrote this actually watched the same movie as I have watched. Because this movie was anything but those three things.The story is about a clan of flesh-eating cave-dwelling savages whom prey upon people in Dead River, Maine.Right... This storyline was so fundamentally ridiculous that I gave up on the movie after 35 minutes and stopped it to watch something else. So the audience is to believe that in this day and age that flesh-eating savages still exist and roam the hillsides? And better yet, they are smart enough to use modern day tools and cover up their private parts because this is what their lack of exposure to society and mannerism has taught them. Right...The whole concept of the movie was ludicrous, and was delivered by the actors and actresses with no conviction, which just made it even more difficult to buy into the story and the world that director Andrew Van Den Houten was trying to sell with "Offspring".This movie will quietly go to die on the DVD shelf, never to see the light of day again. This was without a doubt one of the worst movies that I have stumbled upon.

Along the coastline in Maine there is a feral pack of mostly teenagers and kids who attack and eventually eat their victims. The group attacks a family and is after the infant thinking its blood is stronger. Two women fight to survive as they are held captive in a cave while the infant is being guarded by his ten year old brother (Kastel). There are attempts at suspense and scares but most of them fall flat. Based on the novel by Jack Ketchum who also wrote this screenplay, Offspring is not a very fun ride as a horror film. It is brutal in parts but in a grueling way. The gore and cruelty is plentiful but the movie is clumsy, dull and pretty forgettable.

This is probably how a film by Ed Wood would look nowadays, if he would have made his films at modern standards! Not that there are many technical mistakes, but it takes about 20 minutes to get used to the wooden-handed style of direction and poor acting. If you can stand through that so far, and don't mind very dumb policemen in a movie, the film actually delivers enough gory scenes which might be quite enjoyable for fans of the genre.Funny was that the Japanese DVD had subtitles for the dialogs between the cannibals, I doubt that there are some in the original version.Except the taboo of the involvement of children, this film based on Jack Ketchum's novel lacks the intensity of "The Girl Next Door" which I liked much better!

Yes, according to one of my old contacts in Lansing, new Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder eliminated the Wolverine state's most-generous-in-America tax credits for the film industry the day after viewing Jack Ketchum's made-on-Lake-Michigan fiasco flick in the executive mansion screening room. (Snyder lives elsewhere; he only goes to his official digs to view movies on nights he has to "sleep over" in the state capital). "I may be just a nerd," his honor sniffed, "but I know a hack job when I see one."To summarize the governor's comments, which were too lengthy to repeat verbatim here, he had a problem with all of the victims in OFFSPRING being "dumber than Petoskey Stones" (which happen to be our official state lapidary fodder). "I know we in business school always made fun of the CJ (criminal justice) majors, but heck, even Barney Fife would not have died on the beach like that, let alone three officers with guns. And those killer kids were not even supposed to have any special zombie powers!" Secondly, his excellency opined, the "Second Stolen" character was built like a 13-year-old girl, so WHY did she wander the woods NUDE (except for her waist-high knife sheath belt), while she put on a surprisingly well-preserved padded bra to have sex in the privacy of her cannibal cave? And regarding all this literal self-flagellation she performed when alone in the woods: why didn't she buy something with DEET, if the horseflies were so bad?Speaking of conundrums, our self-styled Nerd Boy continued, how is it the cannibals spent most of their time trudging along the low sand dunes of Lake Michigan's Norton Shores, but whenever they looked up the camera showed the craggy outcroppings of Lake Superior (including the iconic rock formation named Miners' Castle near Munising) 489 miles away?Gov. Snyder closed by observing that the only silver lining in OFFSPRING's cloud is that Michigan is somehow standing in for Maine's Atlantic coast. "As the credits started to roll, I realized it was my civic duty to nip this movie malarkey in the bud, before some other bozo makes an equally asinine film that includes characters KNOWINGLY in our Great Lakes State Winter Wonderland."To which I might add a personal "Amen," what with the bar being raised so high recently by CATFISH and Eminem's Superbowl Chrysler ad.