Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Paul Magne Haakonsen 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.

happyendingrocks Jack Ketchum is a first-rate horror writer, undoubtedly one of the best in the business today, but the decision to translate his Offspring for the screen is a perplexing one. For starters, Offspring isn't one of Ketchum's strongest books, so of all the stories this scribe has committed to the page, the material here barely hints at his true powers. But perhaps more importantly, Offspring is actually a continuation of the events in Ketchum's first novel, Off Season, which has not been made into a film as of this writing. So what we get here is the sequel to a movie that doesn't exist, which obviously causes numerous problems right from the get-go.It's not impossible to gather the general plot line of Off Season from the meager hints dropped in this film, and Offspring has enough of a presence of its own to be an enjoyable ride despite its absent back-story, but since our de facto hero here ends up being former Sheriff George Chandler, the fact that this outing shares almost nothing about him will make it challenging for viewers unfamiliar with the source novels to fully immerse themselves into his battle and navigate through the who's and what's. The version of Offspring this write-up is referring to clocks in at a lean 74 minutes minus the credits, which forces a judicious presentation of the happenings that unfortunately leaves many important details out of the mix. Some members of the feral cannibal clan aren't even given names, and with only a few sections of translated dialogue to clue us in on their dark purposes, the meticulously crafted inner thoughts, gruesome origins, and intricate familial relationships outlined in Ketchum's book are completely absent. All we really end up knowing about the animalistic brood from what's portrayed here is that they kill people, which is certainly enough to usher in the gore-fest that follows, but also fosters an unsatisfying understanding of exactly why the events in the film are taking place. Likewise, there isn't much time for character development to help us get a better grasp on the tormented victims in the piece, and since they're all essentially simply introduced then slaughtered or tortured, none of the horrific scenarios skated through here have nearly as much impact as they should.Apparently, the German release of Offspring runs an even 100 minutes, so this choppily truncated version is clearly missing some crucial pieces. I'm not sure exactly what was excised for American audiences, but the whip-crack pace of the Offspring I saw never allows it to slow down long enough to generate any tension. All of the most harrowing sections of Ketchum's novel are either missing entirely or dealt with so quickly that they are stripped of their resonance, which effectively removes most of the actual horror from the equation.In its place, we are treated to an overtly senseless but generously graphic bloodbath, and on that front at least, Offspring is largely successful. Since Ketchum himself wrote the screenplay for this offering, the salient elements of the carnivorous cave dwellers' hideous habits are all on the menu, and it is a credit to the film-makers that they had the cajones to maintain the author's vision, leaving in even the most unsavory aspects at the risk of alienating viewers not acclimated to Ketchum's often nauseating prose (the intestine munching scene, in particular, is a doozy that will make even the most jaded splatter fans stand up and take notice). Since the film deals openly and explicitly with the slaughter of infants, and children butchering and devouring people, the disturbing and unrelenting tone of Ketchum's tale remains intact, and the faithful adherence to that facet of the book is especially welcome since so much of the thematic and exploratory meat has been omitted.Though the look of the homicidal moppets and their psychotic matriarch sticks fairly closely to what Ketchum describes in his text, I was a bit disappointed by how plain their ensembles are in the film. The members of the cannibal tribe are essentially garbed in stereotypical Lord Of The Flies attire, wrapped in skimpy loincloths and decked out in indeterminate tribal jewelry that mostly looks like the kind of stuff you'd find at any farmer's market. I would have hoped that a prolific and resourceful band of killers such as this would be a bit more creative with their adornments, and since there isn't anything particularly ghoulish or noteworthy about their appearances, the children aren't nearly as menacing as they could have been, and often look downright goofy despite the admittedly sickening deeds we see them partake in with glee.Offspring can only be enthusiastically recommended to people who have read and enjoyed the book; at least they have the luxury of being able to fill in the blanks, since what's on the screen is far too brief and incomprehensible to adequately encompass this tale. Those who are merely looking for a gory and slippery romp will find plenty to keep them amused here, but even with the ample red sauce on display, the terse and befuddling presentation will make this a tough sell for the uninitiated.As a whole, Offspring simply feels incomplete. However, considering that more than twenty minutes of potentially important footage was unceremoniously hacked away, that parting impression is perhaps the lone aspect of the film that truly makes sense.

msclarissa This is probably how a film by Ed Wood would look nowadays, if he would have made his films at modern standards! Not that there are many technical mistakes, but it takes about 20 minutes to get used to the wooden-handed style of direction and poor acting. If you can stand through that so far, and don't mind very dumb policemen in a movie, the film actually delivers enough gory scenes which might be quite enjoyable for fans of the genre.Funny was that the Japanese DVD had subtitles for the dialogs between the cannibals, I doubt that there are some in the original version.Except the taboo of the involvement of children, this film based on Jack Ketchum's novel lacks the intensity of "The Girl Next Door" which I liked much better!

john-souray I was going to say that this film was lazy and incompetent independent film-making at its worst. I keep trying to make this point; low budgets needn't matter, and we don't mind the cheap special effects and the limited sets if the film is made with passion and conviction. It doesn't cost anything to get the plot right; just imagination and attention to detail. But that's exactly what this film seems to lack.An update of the Scottish Sawney Beane legend and transplanting to Maine and the Canadian coast, it has some promising ideas and a couple of effective sequences, but it fails to establish them or develop them properly. What's with the lighthouse keeper? We get a glimpse of a newspaper clipping while the opening credits roll, and one of the characters makes a brief reference during the film, but this history deserved telling properly, even if only narrated by one of the characters, and could have added real mythic power to the plot. But it appears the film-makers just couldn't be bothered.And then 76 minutes later, barely achieving the minimum respectable length for a feature film, it comes to an abrupt end, with several characters and plot lines unresolved. Please no, don't tell me you're leaving the door open for a sequel. (Adopt appropriate gravelly voice: Offspring 2 – the new generation!) In between, there's a load of confused stumbling around in night-time woods or on stretches of beach that look nothing like the earlier panoramic daytime shots we had of the coastline.I was going to say all this, but then I glanced up at the technical information in this IMDb entry. 100 minutes, it says. A hundred! But my UK rented copy was only 76 minutes; both the sleeve and the DVD timer confirm it. That's a quarter of the film gone! No wonder the plot seems sketchy, and you can't follow what's happening.It is entirely incomprehensible. It carries a UK 18 certificate, which is the most serious apart from the 18Rs that can only be bought from licensed sex shops, and I don't imagine they have anything in them that can't be seen for free on the internet. What on earth can the UK censors have found that required 24 minutes of cuts? If it really was originally 100 mins I frankly don't see what the point of releasing the film like this is. At the very least, this review stands as a warning to UK viewers; check the length. If it's the 76 minute version I saw, I'm certainly not recommending it.Edit: Barely a couple of weeks after posting this, I read in my newspaper that "The Serbian Film" had received between four and five minutes of cuts at the hands of the UK censor, and that this made it the most cut UK film for sixteen years. If that's so, then I was wrong to blame the cut from 100 to 76 minutes on the censor. This makes it all the more baffling. Why would you voluntarily cut your own film to such a skimpy dog's dinner? In any case, it doesn't change my recommendation (or lack of it): just the attribution of blame.