Monday, November 02, 2009

Offerings (1989)

Sometimes it's the little things that stick out in a movie. Offerings is a pretty undistinguished Halloween ripoff from 1989 (way to jump on that slasher bandwagon in a timely way, guys!) and made in Oklahoma. It slavishly follows the Halloween template - weird kid gets locked up, comes back years later to kill a batch of teenagers, there's an expert who tries to track him down, etc. This killer, John Radley, leaves the occasional gift for the final girl, who was his only friend back when he was just a weird kid - an ear on the porch, a nose in a newspaper, and so on. One night all of the teens are watching TV and waiting for a pizza, and when the pizza finally arrives, it's just sitting on the front porch with no deliveryman in sight, and it's not just cheese like they ordered - both pizzas are now sausage pizzas - OR ARE THEY? As one teen says, "It doesn't taste like sausage but it's good."

Of course, later on the sheriff analyzes the pizza (?) and the lab results come back and the kids were all eating human sausage, reinforcing the horror-movie trope that when people eat human flesh and don't know it, it's DELICIOUS.

But here's the thing - I can understand how a killer could carve a fillet or a rough steak out of a human victim, maybe even grind up the meat into human hamburger. But sausage? So John Radley killed somebody, butchered some meat off their body, ground it up, seasoned it, filled it into a casing, cooked it, and then waited around for the teens to order a pizza for his savory cannibalistic topping? It's a weird little detail that obviously none of the filmmakers thought about very hard, and this scenario I invented is actually more amusing than the movie itself - but I wouldn't have invented this scenario without watching Offerings, so thanks to the filmmakers for that.

3/10

3 comments:

Sam Juliano said...

My response here Jeff is getting off the subject but I must ask if you have seen or are planning to see THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, which I saw last week and thought one of the absolute best horror films in many a year. In fact, I consider it at this point one of the ten best films of 2009. I hope you have this lined up if you haven't seen it yet. I'd love to hear your take.

Jeff McMahon said...

Hi, Sam. I heard a few vague things about House of the Devil, but you're the first person to have a strong enough opinion about it to make me want to check it out, which I will do sometime in the next week. Thanks!

Sam Juliano said...

Thanks Jeff. I do look forward to your response.