Saw 'The Offerings' being fond of horror/thriller regardless of budget (even if not my favourite genre), and the cover was cool. Was less taken by the concept though, which sounded ridiculous. Being behind on my film watching and reviewing, with a long to watch and review list that keeps getting longer, it took me a while to get round to watching and reviewing.
Unfortunately, do have to agree with the low rating and the poor reviews. 'The Offerings' is one of those films that never took off, starting off not very interestingly and never recovered and progressively got worse, particularly in the near-unwatchable later stages. Never judge a film without seeing the whole thing and wanted to not make 'The Offerings' an exception, so gave it a fair chance.
The location is also suitably spooky. It is agreed too that the too infrequent and brief special effects are surprisingly not bad, having seen so many films recently where the effects have been one of the biggest problems.
However, so much brings 'The Offerings' down. All the acting is either over-histrionic or disinterested, both in a few cases, and the direction is so phoned in and pedestrian, one gets the sense that the director showed no interest in the film at all. Too much of the soundtrack is intrusive and annoying, made worse by the excessive and obvious sound effects that just cheapens the mood. The film looks drab generally and like it was made in haste, the photography especially betrays that with its amateurishness.
Where 'The Offerings' most underwhelms is the writing and story. The writing is incredibly lazy, it's awkward in dialogue, very confused as a result of not tying things up or going into full detail and doesn't feel complete. The story suffers from a very limp pace, apparent early on and gets slower and slower until an interminably dragged out second half. It further suffers from feeling too much like a short film stretched out with a lot of useless padding. The stereotypical characters are both bland and annoying and the inconsistent and illogical motivations bring them down further.
For a film billed as a horror, there is very little interesting and nothing remotely scary which makes a waste of such a spooky-looking location. The scares and thrills are too few, barely any even, and are far too predictable, anaemic and weakly timed to make impact, with the dull pacing and obvious sound effects cheapening them significantly. 'The Offerings' doesn't engage let alone thrill, the more it progressed the duller, predictable and more nonsensical it became for a premise that was already ridiculous. The ending leaves very little impact, very contrived and could have been rounded off better.
In summary, very poor on the whole. 2/10 Bethany Cox
