Flesh, Bone, Teeth, And A Little Gristle: A Review Of Offspring (2009)

Yell! Magazine’s review of Offspring (2009):

If you’ve been craving a different taste of horror lately, I might have something up your alley. Remember all the buzz about The Woman not too long ago? What many people may not realize is that The Woman is actually a follow-up to Offspring (2009), a movie directed by The Woman‘s producer, Andrew van den Houten.

Unlike many of my movie reviews, I’m going to stray away from the straight up plot synopsis I give and delve into the good, the bad, the gory, and the ugly for this one. There’s just too much ground to cover and this is one of those movies that you really have to see a few times to let everything sink in – but here’s a little bit of obligatory back story: A cave-dwelling cannibalistic tribe has been preying on a Maine community for some time, though roughly 10 years ago, it was thought that they were all wiped out. Well, guess who’s resurfaced? Ding, ding, ding, it’s our sharp-teethed little savages, on the prowl for some delectable human flesh. And let me tell you all something right now, they’re a holy Hell of a lot less charming and sophisticated than Dr. Lecter.

The first 5 to 7 minutes of the film get off to a rip-roaring start. We’re treated to a scene of gore so incomprehensible that my brain said, “Okay, this is supposed to be a woman who has been literally ripped apart,” but logically I still have no clue what that even was, because to think about a human looking like that just boggles the mind. There’s so much blood and gore that it’s as if the prop master and special FX man got together and said, “Okay, we have to make this shocking, but we also want to be cheap. Lester, you get the corn syrup ready and I’m going to go hit up all the meat sales and the Goodwill. We’re going to make this so cheap and disturbing that we’ll practically be giving the nightmares away!”

To me, it honestly looked sort of like they did exactly what I just described and stuffed a bunch of raw meat into some clothes they found at the Goodwill, poured fake blood all over it, added in a few latex limbs and said, “Ah, this is art!” And for what it’s worth, it is – it may seem over the top at the first, but when you realize that they’re cannibals, it goes from laughable to downright gross/awesome in no time flat.

Oh, and did I mention the dead baby? Yeah, that also happens within the first 10 minutes of the movie. We’re treated to a grotesque dead baby in a plastic bag. I have a hunch that was the tribe’s idea of take-out.

Continue reading the Offspring review after the jump…