(Streamed via Midnight Pulp)
A creepy mute kid is dared by bullies to walk around the edge of a well. One of the kids pushes him in, and as a result, he winds up spending the next ten years in a catatonic state at a mental institution. Naturally, he wakes up, returns to his hometown, and begins killing off the people who wronged him when he was a child.
Offerings is yet another low budget Halloween clone. It’s probably one of the most unabashed ones I’ve seen. It’s not terrible, just formulaic. It probably works better as a time capsule than a horror movie because of the bad fashions and even worse hair.
It’s very much following a blueprint, but it’s one that works. Like Halloween, many of the kills are bloodless or occur offscreen. Even the back-from-the-dead scene where the killer rises up is the same. The music is a blatant rip-off of John Carpenter’s score too. We also get a death by hypodermic needle scene that’s reminiscent of Halloween 2. One slight change is that the killer doesn’t eat a dog when he returns home, but a duck.
In fact, the movie is at its best when it’s doing its own thing. I liked the scene where the killer ties up a guy in a work shed and tries to use a chainsaw on him, but it runs out of gas. Then he tries a power drill, but it’s too low on charge. Finally, he settles on twisting the vice till the guy’s head is crushed. There’s also a novel bit where he kills a pizza delivery boy and substitutes the sausage topping with human flesh. If the film really wanted to be successful, it should’ve added more of these little macabre touches. As it stands, that’s about the best thing Offerings has to offer.
Funnily enough I actually saw this film before I ever saw Halloween so I never recognized it as a rip-off.
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