Jack Ketchum's Offspring
Source-Ghosthouse Underground DVD
First off I am a huge Jack Ketchum fan,and also have been very impressed with the 3 previous films based on his novels. So when I first heard about a film adaptation of Offspring,which is my second favorite novel from him,I was very excited. I had a feeling that no R rated movie could accurately recreate the novel.
A recently divorced mother and her son travel up to the Maine coast to visit some friends. The first day there the mom gets a call from her ex-husband. He is driving up to come see them. This upsets her cause he was abusive and she has a restraining order against him. Later that night before he arrives a local "family" of cannibals attacks the house. The husband of the couple dies first in a pretty gruesome way. 3 of the cannibal kids surround the wife of the couple,but the divorced mom manages to run up stairs,get the couple's baby,and makes it to the room her son is sleeping in. The oldest male of the cannibals follows her and tries to get in the room. The cannibals want the baby to replace one that died earlier. The mom gets her son to jump out the window and she follows while holding the baby. All three of them run off into the woods. The male cannibal manages to break thru the door and sees them running off into the woods. He goes and tells the head of the "family", a very alpha female. And she tells all the kids to run after them. They run out and this is the moment that the ex-husband happens to drive up. The cannibal kids assault his car,and he manages to drive off. As he is driving very fast down the dirt roads leading away from the house,he runs into 3 cops that are looking for the cannibals. They start to question him,and he runs off into the woods. Meanwhile Mom,son,and baby are hiding in a tree house the son had found earlier. For some unknown reason the Mom decides they need to keep moving. So they all climb down . They run for a short while when they run into the eldest male cannibal. The mom hands the baby off to her son and tells him to run. Mom is taken hostage by the male,but the son manages to make it back to the tree house. He leaves the baby up there and climbs down and starts trailing the cannibal that is dragging his mom to the cave where they live. The ex-husband comes out of the woods onto a beach,where he is accosted by some of the cannibals . They cut him on his left calf and leave him on the beach. Not much later the 3 cops are a little ways away from the ex-husband on the beach. They think they hear something and 3 of the cannibal kids attack them. One cop gets a very long nail shoved into his left eye. another is stabbed in the gut.The cop with the nail in his eye ,pulls out his gun and shots the kid that is still hanging on him directly in the head. The third cop,who is actually a retired cop that has dealt with some of this "family before,is knocked to the ground. He hits his head on a rock and passes out. The Alpha female cannibal comes along sees the three presumed dead cops,plus the dead kid,and tells one of the surviving kids to take the dead body up to the cave. Alpha female keeps walking along the beach and finds ex-husband,and she finds a connection in him.So she helps him to his feet and they head towards the cave. The son sees all of this and also heads towards the cave. The ex-cop comes too and heads down the beach,where he meets up with the son. This leads up to a very violent and gruesome showdown that would ruin the movie if i talked about it. The acting was uniformly good. The story follows the book very closely. And the special effects amazed me,since I knew this was a very low budget film. I found this to be a stunningly brutal movie,that really didn't pull any punches,and it is the best American made cannibal movie I have seen. Not only that but it is also the best horror film I have seen this year. A+