Review of Offerings

Offerings is your basic slasher horror film. Directed, edited, written and produced by a man named Christopher Reynolds, it stars Loretta Leigh Bowman (Ya, I've never heard of her either) and a few other unknowns. John Radley is your typical neighbourhood weirdo/mute. The only difference is that he eats animals and his mother treats him like filth (including butting out her cigarettes in his breakfast). John's only friend is a girl named Gretchen. Naturally, Gretchen gets teased by everybody for hanging it with someone as introverted as John Radley. So one day the neighbourhood kids push Johnny down a well and leave him their. The incident leaves his face horribly disfigured and damages the limbic region of his brain, thus destroying any conscience he had in the first place. To make a long story short, John ends up murdering his mother, being placed under sedatives in a pysch hospital for 10 years, and breaks out after impaling a few people with needles. Get the picture? The rest of the story deals with him coming back and murdering all of the kids that did him wrong. He severs off their body parts and leaves them on the now teenage Gretchen's doorstep as his 'offerings'. It's pretty much like every other clichéd horror flick released in the 80's. One thing you're bound to notice in the first 20 minutes is that this is almost a scene-by-scene rip-off of John Carpenters 'Halloween' (Scott, I'm looking your way). No seriously, I could almost picture Carpenter watching this and cursing. We have a few Carpenter-isms to point out: An almost EXACT copy of his synthesized music, a pudgy cop who would rather bust a kid for porn then find out why body parts keep showing up randomly, horny teenage girls who would rather wear belly tops then watch the news, a psychology professor who thinks he can catch the killer and of course several ominous camera angles that either show us whatever the killer sees or shows us his eyes. All of these things add up to a very basic horror movie. I'll give it some credit though; there is a scene near the beginning that really made me cringe. I'm still trying to figure out if animals were actually killed on set. Apparently, on John's journey from the pysch back to his hometown, he eats various animals he finds in the countryside. Well our director Chris Reynolds decided to show some pretty grotesque close-ups of the carcasses-including flies! On a more supernatural note, I noticed that the guy who played the older John (Richard A. Buswell) also played a car driver in 'Rain man'. What makes this weird is the fact that these are the only two films that he's ever been in and I reviewed them both on the same night! Talk about creepy… Overall, the acting is what you'd expect in this type of film. The weird thing is that sometimes an actor will talk with a Texan sort of accent in one scene and then talk totally different in the next. I only mention this because it happened more than once; and well, it was kind of weird. The best acting performance came from a grave-digging intern who portrayed the clichéd, creepy caretaker mould to a tee. Some of the flaws of Offerings: A couple of shots blatantly cross the axis of shooting. These scenes don't even include the killer, so I don't think the director was trying to make us "feel" any sort of emotion; it just came across as being erroneous. The film is also irrevocably dark most of the time. In some scenes you can tell the only lighting present is the flashlight a character is holding. This is probably why about 90% of the movie takes place outside or around the vicinity of daylight. So aside from being overly predictable, unrealistic at times and a carbon copy of "Halloween', Offerings could do a lot worse for itself. If you found this cheap enough somewhere, it could make a pretty good purchase for 1 or 2 viewings perhaps. Actually, it would probably make a better rental.

6/10