Shot in Oklahoma City, Offerings, um, offers a brazenly transparent imitation of John Carpenter’s Halloween, but one in which Michael Myers is replaced by someone who resembles a grown-up version of 1970s wunderkind Mason Reese, the Underwood Deviled Ham spokeskid. Additionally, his face looks as if he settled down for a nap, but had no access to a pillow, so he made do with a plugged-in toaster oven and its frayed cord.
The slasher in this slasher bears the terrifying name of Johnny. While in grade school, Johnny (Josh Coffman) found himself the frequent target of bullying by his peers, who one day forced him to hop atop a water well in the park and circumnavigate its bricks. Little Johnny’s reward for successful completion of this daunting task? A backhanded compliment (“Not bad for a retard!”), followed immediately by a plunge down the well that renders him unwell, earning Johnny permanent residency at Oakhurst State Mental Hospital.
Ten years later, now a beefy adult, Johnny (fight choreographer Richard A. Buswell) escapes the sanitarium to exact revenge on his tormentors. One gets his head stuck in a vise, then hammered for good measure; another is hanged to death the front yard while his parents laugh their asses off (to cartoons on TV, but still). The only student saved from Johnny’s reign of terror is Gretchen (Loretta Leigh Bowman), the peroxide blonde who was actually nice to him Way Back When. In fact, he brings her hence-the-title gifts — unfortunately, they’re of the nonreturnable kind: crudely carved body parts of his feather-haired, acid-washed victims.
This leads to Offerings’ most notorious scene, in which Gretchen and friends not only eat a pizza left at her front door, but are unable to distinguish the difference between sausage and bloody human flesh. The pie becomes a bona fide plot device, like a frickin’ Maltese Falcon topped with extra cheese. In a move that predates the self-reflexive nature of Scream, Gretchen and her BFF (Elizabeth Greene) discuss the dumb decisions made by characters in horror movies, as if doing so retroactively excuses the colossal stupidity they already have displayed (with more yet to come).
Nice try, though, on the part of debuting director Christopher Reynolds (whose only other feature in this creative capacity was Lethal Justice, a 1991 obscurity also shot in the Sooner State). Multitasking as Offerings’ writer, producer and editor, Reynolds gave himself a small part as an Oakhurst physician more hypocrite than Hippocratic in saying of patient Johnny, “Every time he takes a crap, he thinks he’s had an abortion. Let me tell you, he’s had some ugly kids.”
My gut instinct upon seeing the film’s ad in my newspaper’s local listings three decades ago was dead-on correct: Offerings is a terribly told piece of B-horror trash on a Z-level budget. Reynolds could not have chosen an actress more skill-impaired than Bowman to anchor a national theatrical feature, nor a more ineffectual Donald Pleasence stand-in than G. Michael Smith as the belt-straining, biscuit-doughy Sheriff Chism, who, speaking of his name, busts a tween boy (Chasen Hampton, They Crawl) for “reading” used porno mags in an abandoned house. And yet, there is something about its aggressive incompetence that makes Reynolds’ ugly kid easy to love. Not bad for a … oh, hell, you know. —Rod Lott