Offerings is often written off as a bad attempt at a HALLOWEEN clone. sort of from the plot. sort of from the style. even right down to the soundtrack. even i will admit that it is hard not to see some faint similarity. also, it is hard to not mention that Offerings is a very flawed movie. but when are fans of garbage cinema ever concerned with that? in fact, that would be a selling point! i refuse to acknowledge the bad rap this film gets, and believe me, i have scanned through many a bad review for this one. instead, i am here to say that we should not find ourselves shrugging our shoulders and sarcastically saying "god, how many of these exist?" no, not at all. rather, we should be thanking the gods of cheap horror and sleaze that we have one more piece of trash to add to the collection!Offerings follows a plot line that we are all familiar with. the mullet-sporting john is the mute weirdo neighborhood kid with a bad home life that gets repeatedly fucked with by the heartless bike riding ruffians of his town. Johns only friend and possible pre-teen love interest, Gretchen, half-asses her attempts of sticking up for him when these kids come peddling through the streets. John attempts to defend his name by a test of bravery-- walking around the mouth of the local well. of course, one of the jerk kids jumps at John, which makes him flinch and lose his balance and down the well john goes. Instead of running for help, all of the kids (including his only friend Gretchen) ditch him out down there.
fast forward 10 years and we find out that John has been comatose since the accident. sadly, even in his comatose state, john just cant catch a break. as a nurse looks him over, one of the doctors balls up a wad of gum he was chewing and sticks it on johns comatose nose for a cheap laugh. poor john. at this point, for some reason, the nurse then starts babbling about the planetary alignment with the sun and the moon and its gravitational reaction. i guess this was the reasoning for Johns sudden return to consciousness! immediately, the nurse meets a fairly gruesome end with a large needle to the forehead (and the plunger is pulled back to suck out some brain juice for good measure!). now it is time for john to return home, to find Gretchen and make the others pay.
Back home, Gretchen is now all grown up, and dumb as ever. all of the kids still maintain the same friend group, but oddly look way older than the 18 year olds they are supposed to be playing. one by one, they are starting to get picked off and pieces of their bodies keep ending up on Gretchen's front porch as (follow me here..) an "Offering" of John's love for her. there! we have made the connection! we are also introduced to one of Johns doctors who is trying to track him down before anymore violence occurs (sound familiar?). also, we get the treat of being introduced to the hero of the film, the staple of any so-bad-it's-good slasher, the bumbling overweight town sheriff.
I found myself pretty astonished during this film. i just couldnt imagine how the characters actually reacted in certain situations. for instance, a scene where the teens find out that the sausage on the pizza they just ate may have actually been human flesh, they just seem to let it roll off their back. when gretchen finds severed body parts wrapped in bloodied newspaper, she just kind of shrugs her shoulders and waits for the sheriff to figure it out. even when John is trying to break in the house to kill gretchen, she makes her best friend wait by the door to let her know if he actually makes it in. what!? obviously, this leads to a beheading. i guess you dont know if you should laugh out loud of be appalled at the level of stupidity projecting from your television screen.
Offerings is a pretty fun movie if you are able to turn the "intelligent" button off on your brain. it is a HALLOWEEN knock-off in a time when HALLOWEEN knock-off's were overdone to the max. the acting is fairly wretched and the dialouge is spoken is some hybrid of hick twang and california valley. this only adds to the aura of brainlessness you get from the characters in the film. it is low on gore and special fx and it also, shockingly enough, has no nudity whatsoever. despite its lesser qualities i would say Offerings is a good watch if you are ever feeling nostalgic about late 80's trash movies.
BODYCOUNT-6
(not the trailer...but the needle scene)