Based on the 1991 novel Offspring by Kack Ketchum, itself a sequel to his as yet unfilmed and highly controversial 1981 debut novel Off Season (one has to wonder why they didn’t just film the first book), Andrew van den Houten’s Offspring became the unlikely progenitor of a franchise, followed by The Woman (2011) and Darlin’ in 2019. Scappily directed and for the most part poorly acted, Offspring is the least of the three films and gets by solely on its extraordinary levels of violence and gore.
Inspired by both the legend of Sawney Bean and Wes Craven’s film The Hills Have Eyes (1977) (which also drew heavily on the possibly entirely apocryphal legend of the 16th century Scottish cannibal clan) Offspring follows the Halbard family – mum Amy (Ahna Tessler), dad David (Andrew Elvis Miller) and their baby daughter – as they settle into their new home on the north-east American coastal town of Dead River, Maine. Nearby, the descendants of a massacre by cannibals are living in a cave, themselves now flesh eaters, have spotted the baby which they believe will give them great power and can offer redemption for their having killed and eaten another infant and are closing in on the family.
Unsurprisingly given that it’s based on the second book in a series, Offspring has the feel of a sequel to a story we haven’t seen yet. A seasoned cop (Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Brood (1979)‘s Art Hindle) is called in by local law enforcement because he’s had prior experience with the cannibal clan and fills in back story as if he’s recapping events from a previous film. Otherwise details about the cannibals and their origins are sketchy (we get a brief account of their origins, know that they speak in a guttural language of their own and have strange and never-explained rituals, many of them involving flagellation), thrown away in passing dialogue exchanges all the better to get on with the business at hand and get to the gory bits.
And there are certainly plenty of those. Offspring has no truck with the political and social subtexts of Craven’s blueprint – this is just gore and violence for its own sake and on that level it works well enough. But one can’t help bit wish that there had been more of a point, as there would be in the sequels. Here it’s just a parade of atrocities trotted out with little thought given as to the hows or whys of this strange “family” and their alternative lifestyle. And consequently, despite all the splatter it’s actually rather dull.
There are odd moments of weird, disquieting invention along the way. The clan hold babies in extreme reverence, a thread that would run throughout the series, believing them to have some sort of quasi-religious significance. And they keep a mentally challenged adult, known only as Cow (Edward Nelson) as a sexual plaything for the teenage Eartheater (Jessica Butler) and source of new offspring for the largely matriarchal clan. A different Cow got his own turn in the spotlight in Ketchum’s short story The Cow, a sequel to the novel version of The Woman.
The only depth in Ketchum’s own screenplay comes from the first hints of the toxic masculinity that were to become a more obvious target of the series, much more so in the later films. Here it comes in the shape of the appalling Stephen Carey (a nicely depraved turn from Erick Kastel), an abusive husband to Claire (Amy Hargreaves) and father to Luke (Tommy Nelson, also very good) who take refuge with the Halbards only for the sleazy Stephen to show up unexpectedly. Stephen is a brutish misogynist who revels in the clan’s gruesome and provocative treatment of his hated wife and comes across as more of a monster than the cannibals – they’re doing what they’re doing to stay alive, Stephen behaves the way he does because he gets a kick from it.
Like the subsequent The Woman, the social satire is superficial but it’s less challenging and problematic than the sequel, but the film is also less memorable as a consequence. The one bright spot is the extraordinary and committed performance from Scottish actress Pollyanna McIntosh as “the woman”, the leader of the cannibal tribe. McIntosh would reprise the role in The Woman and take over the writing and directing reins for the third – and best – in the series, Darlin’.
The EOFFTV Review 