Offspring (2009)

The Worst Film Ever

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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.

I hope Ketchum's book is better than this laughable cinematic yarn about a tribe of cannibals living in the Northeast woods. Periodically, the clan descends on a small town in Maine to grab a bite, if you get my drift. The plot focuses on two women and their children, one of whom is a boy who does his darnedest to stay alive and rescue his mom, and her friend and the friend's baby. Unfortunately, the director either didn't know how to work with the kid or the kid wasn't up to the job. I suspect the former. A minor subplot has the dastardly, out of control husband of the friend driving up to confront his wife about their pending divorce. He of course proves far more dangerous than the cannibals. There's one familiar face in the cast, Art Hindle, a veteran Canadian actor who plays the town sheriff. Otherwise, this is your typical generic cast. The actors playing the cannibals are so bad, it hurts. You wanna see cannibals living in the backwoods, watch WRONG TURN. Those were some scary cannibals! Skip this low-budget mess. If you want to see a Ketchum story handled with more finesse and flair, check out Lucky McKee's THE WOMAN, made a couple of years after OFFSPRING and which may be viewed as a loose followup to it.

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.

I hate it when movies start good and only after few seconds they deteriorate in a very bad way. I liked how it started with the man at his door sees a naked girl standing faraway and throws something and leaves. That took my mind in a totally different direction than that the movie turned out to be later.Anyhow, it is only fair to say that there is one scene, only one scene in the movie that was reallllllllllly good. The scene when the blond girl eats the intestines of the husband and he is looking at his wife and kid and remembering how his day started. He is being eaten in a very savaged way and he is looking back at how beautiful his day started with his wife and beautiful baby girl. This was a very disturbing scene and one that horror fans usually appreciate and seek in horror movies.