Offspring - 1/5

Good Lord, can I pick them lately. "Nine Dead", "Sorority Row", and now "Offspring". It's like I have a bad Horror movie streak that I just can't break! Even a film based on the relatively fun/controversial writer Jack Ketchum book of the same name couldn't save the streak. That's even with Ketchum writing the script! Needless to say, I'll try to keep this one brief as not to bore you with another review where I don't say much good.

"Offspring" weaves a post event tale where the children of a missing light house keeper from wee long ago have lived in the wilderness of North Eastern US and Canada surviving by eating animals and the occasional hiker. Of course this is about the second batch of cannibals that come into contact with society (the first is only referenced by the original police officer whom caught them) as they attack a family in search of a baby that...well I'm not sure why they wanted the baby actually. Something to do with religious juju or something.

So essentially we have a very violent "Lord Of The Flies" like group of young people that speak a random tongue out to capture a baby to induct into their society. Too bad the most intriguing part of this film is the lack of score and poor use of credits. It had an interesting story that went really no where, explained nothing, and gave me no reason to actually root for any of the characters. The best part of this film was some of the gore effects. Not usually a good sign for a low budget Horror flick.

The dialogue was sparse. As sparse as the character work/depth was. The directing had some nice moments with a visual side but stank of a bit too much amateur smell for its own good. Same went for the lacking score and make shift editing. All far too amateur for what I expected from something released in this set of Ghost House Underground. More or less, "Offspring" felt like a made for TV movie littered with some gore, nudity, and the occasional f word.

Not to mention that throughout the film it felt like something was missing from the story. It speeds through all the characters at high speed with not a lot of regard to its degradation of the film, and half of the time I felt like it rushed its story pieces too. I felt as though I needed more all the time.

I'm not going to go too much further into analyzing this one, as it doesn't have too much to analyze. It feels about half assed throughout every aspect and never reaches the horror or the suspense that the story needed to work. It comes off like a bad Stephen King film (ouch) more often than not. Of the four GHU released this year this was by far the weakest entry. 

Written By Matt Reifschneider