When splatter punk author Jack Ketchum’s name is attached to something, goremeisters generally know what they are getting themselves into. So it should come of no shock to those of you in the know when I tell you that Director Andrew van den Houten’s vision of Ketchum’s novel Offspring is pretty much a psychotic mess.

Offspring is the sequel to Ketchum’s groundbreaking 1980 cult debut novel Off Season. That book told the story of a cannibal family that feasted on the residents of the small Maine community of Dead River and the sheriff who hoped to have killed them off. Offspring is about the return of the cannibal family and the reenlistment of now retired Sheriff George Peters (Art Hindle) to find them again.

The residents of Dead River are turning up…well…dead. Eviscerated and decomposing all over their nice clean country houses. When a local family is attacked by the cannibal clan (dressed like rejects from a prehistoric cartoon comedy) survivors Amy (Amy Hargreaves) and Clair (Ahna Tessler) are kidnapped and taken to the cannibal’s beachside cavern lair. Amy (who has a baby at home) is needed to nurse another child the cannibals have stolen. Clair has her own son Luke (Tommy Nelson) and a brutal ex-husband to contend with. Eventually all the families and the cops end up in one final blood-soaked showdown on the beach.

It’s damn near impossible to succinctly describe the narrative of this film without using the term “controlled chaos”. In a very brief 79 minutes this film manages to utterly annihilate a veritable cornucopia of characters. Less than 20 minutes in the film is full-steam ahead on the bloodshed and it never lets up. It’s moving at a break-neck pace toward the horrific climax. What’s amazing is that like the book, the film is going places that you would never want it too. And it’s going there with gallons of grue and glee!

Offspring is more than just another killer kid movie. Children of the Corn or The Orphan have nothing on a film like this. These kids are five, seven, eight years old, eating people alive, stealing babies, hacking off limbs and cooking them over open flames. They get shot in the head by police officers with no regard to their ages. To top off all the violence the children receive, the film also offers assorted severe misogynistic scenes of rape and abuse carried out but the adult protagonists and antagonists as well.