The Worst Film Ever

Sadly Over-hyped

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

I first heard of Jack Ketchum, whose story this movie is based off of, when I was looking at some website and it mentioned the book, The Girl Next Door. Although I haven't read it yet, his name and the book title has stuck with me, since it's suppose to be disturbing. If The Girl Next Door is as anything like Offspring, then yes it will be.After the watching the movie, (I'll get to that in a second), I did a quick search on Ketchum and got this from Wikipedia; "Later, in his teenage years, Ketchum was befriended by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, who became a mentor to him. He supported Ketchum's work just as his work was supported by his own mentor, H.P. Lovecraft." That would definitely help to explain how his unique mindset was encouraged to grow.From the first part of the movie, where the cannibal children are sitting on the kitchen counters cackling in happiness surrounded by blood and guts to the rest of the movie with them jumping out and biting people, I said out loud, "And that is one more reason why I didn't have kids."But it was so much more than kids doing that, there was also their inbred parents, along with lots of topless women, and creepy sexual encounters.If you enjoy a gore fest, this is one you'll probably want to watch, since there was lots of blood, body parts, and eating of flesh. The pulling out the the intestines was a nice touch.Movies with inbred people creep me out the most. I can handle clowns and dolls, but people with teeth missing and who only communicate in grunts, is just too close to something that could actually happen.

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.

After reading several positive reviews of this film I tracked it down because I thought it sounded interesting. It wasn't, it was dumb.There's a tiny town somewhere in America where a gang of cannibals are living in a cave on the beach. These cannibals all have clothes made of animal skin like cavemen, despite living close enough to civilisation to steal some clothes from a washing line every now and then. Also if you're making clothes out of animals why not eat them instead of people and if you're having to resort to cannibalism it might not be such a good idea stealing babies and making your group larger, stupid idiots. Anyway these guys talk in some stupid growly language and have names for each other like eartheater and other dumb crap like that. When they talk their growl language you get really rubbish looking subtitles come up on screen. All their dialogue is embarrassing tripe designed to make you cringe.The cannibals attack a house full of inadequate actors. One of which has their evil ex husband on the way to the house, who within ten seconds of meeting this character you know he's gonna side with the bad guys at some point. Oh and by the way if you don't burst out laughing as one of the stig kids comes through the window of the house and cackles like a little witch as the camera zooms towards it's face then you've just missed out on the only joy this film has to offer.There are scenes of torture which are neither scary or harrowing just stupid due to the fact they're so over the top. The gore in this film is so crude, with bits of leg here and a rubber torso there. The fact it's done in such a straight way makes it even stupider because the whole thing just becomes laughable. The longer the film goes on the dumber it gets. It's just one ineffective scare or anticlimax after another. My partner got so bored she started doing a puzzle. I braved it through to the end and wished I hadn't.This offspring should have been drowned at birth.

I would suggest you read the book. The acting wasn't horrible. Except for the Neanderthals. All their grunting and screaming got old. In the very beginning there's a naked girl and I thought, this can't be bad. I was wrong. It's as if they went looking for the ugliest naked girl they could find. There's also some kind of weird pederast sex going on with an old guy that just lays in the dirt making noises. Also, weirdly, Neanderthals shave their faces, legs and vaginas. Then there's the strange sadist caveman rape scene which includes the caveman biting off the girl's labia. The problem with the movie is that it doesn't really explain any of this any better than I did. The he only redeeming quality of this movie was titties. And even they weren't that great. If none of this deters you from seeing this film, they also kill a couple babies in it. But if you're into that kind of thing...