31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 -Day 15: OFFSPRING (2009)

When unexpected guests drop in for dinner.

In the isolated shore side community of Dead River, Maine, an innocent family's cozy world is shattered when they are targeted by a nomadic clan of feral cannibals who invade their house and immediately get down to killing and butchering. The family's husband is attacked and hauled onto the kitchen table, where he is unceremoniously disemboweled alive. The wife, who was nursing a babe in arms, is brutalized but spared for more sinister purposes, which allows her best friend to scoop up the baby and the young son and flee out of a second-story window. From there it's a harrowing fight for survival against a ravenous horde who, though primitive, are very, very skilled at what they do.

Operating in similar territory to THE HILLS HAVE EYES (original and remake) and evoking the legend of Scotland's 16th century Sawney Bean and his 45-person band of cannibal raiders, OFFSPRING thrusts the audience into the flesh-eating terror almost from the get-go, and once the madness starts it does not let up. It's revealed early on that the cannibals are a family that's been marauding up and down the the Eastern Seaboard since the mid-1800's, hiding out in forests and caves, butchering and eating unsuspecting people, and stealing women and babies to increase their numbers. They exist at a level akin to cavemen and they communicate in grunts and unintelligible spurts of warped English that we can only understand thanks to kindly-provided subtitles. The clan is led by nameless woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) who shows zero mercy, and the rest of her crew follow her example with gusto, which is extra-disturbing when one considers that most of the cannibals are children ranging from approximately eight years old to sixteen or so. They are all stone-cold heartless killers, more animal than human, and murder for them is a reflexive as breathing.

When going into this movie cold, I did not expect it to be as vicious, violent, and gory as it is, and all of that, coupled with a relentless intensity, added up to one hell of a horrifying ride that I thoroughly enjoyed. Some may say they found it impossible to care about the innocent victims because they receive a minimum of script attention that would flesh them out into more three-dimensional people, but I disagree. The abrupt ignition of the mayhem is like being there for it, totally unprepared for the utter savagery in what should be the safety of the nuclear homestead, so full back stories on the characters are unnecessary. All we need to know is that the wife's friend is fleeing her abusive alcoholic husband with her son in tow, and that said asshole husband is heading up to Maine from Connecticut "just to talk." (Needless to say, he gets caught up in the mishegoss.)

So, yeah, I really dug OFFSPRING, and I heartily recommend it to those who can take its up-close-and-personal carnage and cruelty.

Promotional image.