Customer Reviews

Offspring

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Since I am a fan of Jack Ketchum's novels and this was one of my favorites I had to see it (although I have no interest in seeing his other film adaptions).

It's direct to DVD and I knew what to expect. I wasn't that disappointed, mostly because the running time is short and it has some ok production design. The location scout deserves most of the credit in this movie and it was filmed in the US (I have a thing about runaway film productions, they should be labeled as "foreign films")

This film had so much potential but is extremely lackluster. Who thought crazy, cannibal kids could be so trite? The costumes, wigs, and makeup effects look like leftovers from the bargain bin at a Halloween store a week after October 31. This alone could have saved it even from the poor acting performances (which could have been saved through editing).

I have to admit it was nice not to be bombarded with bad CGI for once.

I gave two stars for effort, the location captures the setting in the book, short running time, and being filmed in the US. You won't loose any sleep if you don't see it.

The Offspring is one of those movies that's so awful you have to stare at the screen and keep watching to see if it can get any worse. It does. Cannibalistic, feral children whose idea of show and tell is disembowelment-and a simple disembowelment is a slow night to these kids. They grunt, stab, grunt, mutilate, grunt,and the quickly passed over reason for their existence is that they are the offspring of the children of a lighthouse keeper gone missing off the coast of Maine in the 19th century. I gave this movie two stars because despite the lousy plot, lousy script, lousy acting--the cannibal kids can't even grunt convincingly, the movie is so fascinatingly bad that everyone should watch it to see just how bad a movie can be. Oh scratch that thought----don't watch it.

Pulp/horror writer Jack Ketchum adapts his own novel for Offspring, an interesting entry of sorts in this year's Ghost House Underground lineup. Offspring the novel, was actually a sequel to Off Season, which would have been a more logical adaptation in the first place, but nevermind that for now. Anyway, there's a clan of cannibal kids terrorizing the community, and seeking a fresh baby as well. Hounding them is a retired cop (Art Hindle) while everyone else involved gets chomped, slaughtered, and gutted; and the film makes no apologies for its tone and unsettling gore. Still though, besides some decent gore effects, Offspring features some atrocious acting from pretty much everyone involved (the cannibals in particular are so bad you can't help but laugh), and Ketchum's own screenplay doesn't help matters here either, and ends up being a shell of its source material. All in all, Offspring is worth a look just based on its disturbed content alone, but in the end, this Ketchum adaptation is a disappointment.

It's not perfect but they really left all the gore from the book in, and that is no small feat in the current climate of PG-13 teenie bopper horror movies that are out there. My only complaints are that the movie has a somewhat pedestrian style of direction, the film stock could have looked a bit grittier, and the feral kids look too clean, sort of like the kids from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Having said that, this movie still really delivers the horror. The lead female cannibal is one of the most vicious and intimidating women that I've ever seen on film. She would bite off Ripley's head from Aliens. Men, women and children are all slaughtered without remorse. The pacing moves right along, with the whole story taking place in just a few days.
If you liked The Hills Have Eyes you'll like this. A great late night with beer movie!

I don't know Jack Ketchum's novels so I really can't judge this movie from its novel. So with that being said, here goes. 'Offspring' isn't the worst Horror I've seen at all, and I've seen plenty of stinkers over the years. It has its moments; the good is mainly the gore and the bad is low tension and suspense. I would of loved to have given this a five star rating since I'm a fan of cannibal flicks, but it had too much goofiness (mainly the look of the cannibals), in a film that tries to play out a serious vibe. I loved the musical score which reminded me of the same sounds that can be heard from many 70's grindhouse pictures!

Although, the special effects are great and the acting is fair, 'Offspring' lost me with its cannibals. The reason why that is is because I find it hard to picture cannibals looking and behaving like cavemen in modern day America. There are more flaws that connect to this but it is this one that really gets to me. haha. Again, I'm unaware of the novel but for this film, I'm thinking these nomadic cannibals should of had a much more modern approach. Pretty much the same image of what Near Dark did to vampires should of been done with these cannibals! Wait, buy doing that, it would of been an entirely different flick. I don't know; I'm confused. haha. The flick also lacked in scenery. I would of loved to have seen more of the forest and coastline. Little background was shot. However, the ending is great! I loved the ending! To me the ending is the reward besides seeing some splatter action. All and all, not a bad flick that I wouldn't mind watching again later on. Oh, and I love the cover art for this flick!

My wife and I really enjoyed this film. I'm surprised at the negative reviews since this is one of the best, if not the best, film made from a Ketchum novel. Or by anyone else. Definitely in the year's 10 best for horror. The cannibals (feral humans) are very well acted and portrayed, and the violence is approprite and not really over-the-top. And when a policeman keeps a straight face as he says "this used to be a nice guy" while looking at a pile of gore, well, it could have been "camped" to death, but wasn't.

There is really a lot of junk out there, masquerading as "art". This film is just a plain, good horror film, with no further pretensions.

Pulp/horror writer Jack Ketchum adapts his own novel for Offspring, an interesting entry of sorts in this year's Ghost House Underground lineup. Offspring the novel, was actually a sequel to Off Season, which would have been a more logical adaptation in the first place, but nevermind that for now. Anyway, there's a clan of cannibal kids terrorizing the community, and seeking a fresh baby as well. Hounding them is a retired cop (Art Hindle) while everyone else involved gets chomped, slaughtered, and gutted; and the film makes no apologies for its tone and unsettling gore. Still though, besides some decent gore effects, Offspring features some atrocious acting from pretty much everyone involved (the cannibals in particular are so bad you can't help but laugh), and Ketchum's own screenplay doesn't help matters here either, and ends up being a shell of its source material. All in all, Offspring is worth a look just based on its disturbed content alone, but in the end, this Ketchum adaptation is a disappointment.

I know the adaptation of Jack Kethum's "Offspring" has it's problems one being acting with some of the characters ,costume and a few other flaws but I really enjoyed this gory little fun fest.I had heard so many negative things about it I didn't watch it right away but I'm glad I did.
It's really quite shocking and very gory in parts and the gore was very well done.At the end of the day it's a movie I'll watch again.

Offspring (Andrew van den Houten, 2009)

I find it kind of odd that Offspring, the not-as-good sequel to Jack Ketchum's horrifying first novel Off Season, got filmed first. (Both have, anecdotally at least, been optioned in Hollywood for dog's years.) But I ended up seeing it for a few reasons. First, Ketchum did his own screenplay this time (rather than leaving it to Phil Nutman, as happened with The Girl Next Door, which was nowhere near as good as An American Crime). Second, Andrew van den Houten, who was relegated to the producer's role for The Girl Next Door, stepped into the director's chair for this one, and that seemed like a positive jockey change to me. Third, there's a sequel being filmed... and it's being directed by Lucky McKee. Given that that's already on my list of Must-See-Opening-Night flicks, because Lucky McKee is god, I figured I should check this one out. (Note: van den Houten is also producing the sequel, the working title of which is The Woman.)

Amy (Michael Clayton's Amy Hargreaves) and David (Red Sands' Andrew Elvis Miller) Halbard live in a small town in Maine where, over a decade before, a number of officially-unsolved murders took place. Unofficially, everyone knows what happened--a family of cannibals, living in a close-by cave, went looking for food. But George Chandler (The Brood's Art Hindle), a local cop, managed to chase them off in a hail of gunfire, and things have been quiet since. Until now, that is. In the opening scene, we find out that the survivors from the band, and a new generation of ferals, are back, and worse than ever. Chandler's retired now, but the local cops call him onto the scene to find out if it could be the same bunch. (Ketchum has a cameo as the coroner, by the way.) At the same time, Amy and David get a couple of guests, Clare Carey (Ahna Tessler in her first feature) and her son Luke (The Good Shepherd's Tommy Nelson), who are on the run from Clare's brutally abusive husband Stephen (Headspace's Erick Kastel). Unfortunately, Stephen knows where she went and is on his way, accosting innocent hitchhikers on the drive. All this raises the question: which would you rather be at the mercy of, a drunk ex-husband bent on flaying you alive, or a band of cannibals who are bent on flaying you alive so they can eat you?

While it may be a bit of a stretch to call that a moral ambiguity (or "crisis" might be a better word), I think in the greater scheme of Ketchum's writing, it does play in Skokie; a lot of Ketchum's stuff turns on that sort of moral ambiguity, and he's obviously obsessed by it (viz. the Sylvia Likens case, which Ketchum turned into his finest moment, The Girl Next Door). You take a character or characters, and you put him/them in some sort of no-win situation and ask him/them to choose the lesser of two evils. Or what they perceive as such, anyway; all too often that lesser turns around and bites you in the ass, and Jack Ketchum knows this. Sometimes it works (viz. Red, also turned into an excellent film recently, by none other than Lucky McKee), sometimes it doesn't (The Girl Next Door), and sometimes the lesser turns out to be the greater in ways that will make you question your hold on sanity. And somehow, I guess it was inevitable, this turned into another riff on my review of the novel, which takes that third path with all the unapologetic brazenness Ketchum was known for back in the early days, when he was the guy who showed up in the nightmares of the splatterpunks. But that's not as awful a thing as it may seem, because van den Houten's film is, in the main, faithful to the book. It cuts out a bunch of stuff, granted, because you can't fit an entire three-hundred-plus page novel in a film that runs just over an hour and a half. But since Ketchum did the adaptation, and was not interested in entirely redrafting the script (viz. Pontypool) or just focusing on one piece of the plot (viz. Let the Right One In), the movie does play out like the book. To me, that's always a strength; others might see it differently.

To counter the strength of the movie's faithfulness, there are some drawbacks, as minor as most of them are. This is van den Houten's second feature (following 2005's Headspace), but it still feels like his first. There are some awkwardly-blocked shots, a couple of questionable editing decisions, that sort of thing. And I always wonder about a movie where all the strongest acting comes from people who haven't hit puberty yet. Despite all that, this is another entry in the subgenre of horror film that really gets the griminess right; American horror flicks all seemed really sterile for a long while, while foreigners were turning out movies like Zombi 2 (1980) and Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1988), where the sets weren't pristine and when you severed a limb with a machete, the cut didn't look surgical. It took America a long, long time to catch on to this sort of mean-spirited, though more "realistic" (for lack of a better term) style of making horror films (Eli Roth's Cabin Fever is the first movie I remember seeing that really looked the part, and that was twenty-two years after Zombi 2), but they've been getting more... "popular" is not the correct term, "sophisticated" perhaps?... something, anyway, and Offspring continues that trend. I respect that, but I would have liked to see it bring something new to the table, or at least be the best little indie film it could be; it manages neither, in the same way The Girl Next Door managed neither. But still, if you happen to catch it on late-night cable (don't watch cut basic-cable versions) and you're sick of infomercials, it's a decent way to pass the time. ** ½

Folks, it was bound to happen to Ketchum, it happens to authors all the time, amazing books occasionally end up as barely tolerable cinematic adaptations. In this case the bad cinematic adaptation was spawned from a mediocre novel and, unfortunately, Ketchum is partially to blame as he scripted this adaptation. Thus far Ketchum's work has remained safe from the usually withering touch of death wielded by Hollywood, The Lost and Girl Next Door were both fantastic films and the as-yet unseen Red starring Brian Cox is still highly anticipated. You win some, you lose some though, right?

Offspring isn't a horrible film, it just wasn't very good at all; the directing wasn't strong, the dialogue was clunky and the characters clichéd, the entire thing felt amateurish (especially the acting) and incomplete.

Many people enjoyed this film due to the fair amount of gore on display, and there was, but it just doesn't change my opinion of this film. Gore, when done right, is certainly a plus but it can never make up for a wobbly story that depends on the opening title sequence to fill in the back story viewers will no doubt be asking about by closing credits. By far this is the weakest entry in this year's Ghost House Underground series and, without a doubt, the low point of Ketchum's films. No biggie though, it happens to King all the time. Hell, I'm not sure there's EVER been a decent Koontz film!

I just didn't dig Offspring, it was my least favorite of the films based on Ketchum novels, but that's just inevitability, it would have only been a matter of time before there was a dud. Andrew van den Houten's company Modernciné has produced and released some good stuff so I don't want to come across as being a hater but this was a swing and a miss.