MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Offspring”: Price Narrates 4 Creepy Tales

“The Offspring” (citywide) is an anthology horror movie in which four typically loathsome and creepy tales--mostly about bloody revenge--are related in a breathless lisp by Vincent Price to a skeptical, shrewish outsider played by Susan Tyrrell. It’s definitely no “Dead of Night,” and it suffers from the same blood-swilling excesses of most modern horror movies. But the anthology structure, occasionally inventive camera work and the performances of Price and others keep it a cut, or a slash, above its more obnoxious competitors.

Price, giving the job his fullest, richest, most sepulchral tones of macabre camp, plays the unofficial historian of Oldfield, Tenn., a misbegotten, murderous hamlet in which his niece has just committed some frightful atrocities. Oldfield, Price explains to his arch interlocutor, is spawning ground for unimaginable awfulness.

The four tales he tells, all follow the vein of a horror-fiction specialist. The first--about a shy killer-rapist faced with horrific paternal consequences--features Clu Gulager in a twitchy performance that summons up both O. Z. Whitehead and Dan Duryea; the story is reminiscent of Robert Bloch or Stephen King.

The second tale, about voodoo, immortality and swamp fugitives, has a fine performance by Harry Caesar, and comes as close as any to suggesting Edgar Allan Poe--to whom, along with H. P. Lovecraft, Price, at one point, raises a solemn toast.

Lovecraft himself seems the inspiration for the third tale: about the dire fates awaiting a carnival razor-blade-eater and his sweetie; the carnival is named after the celebrated literary recluse.

And Ambrose Bierce hovers behind the last tale: a Civil War fantasy, with Cameron Mitchell (his best movie role in some time), in which the meek do not inherit the earth.

There’s a mood throughout of foul things squirming up to the light. Writer-director Jeff Burr and co-writers Courtney Joyner and Darin Scott show a welcome reverence for the past of movie horror: Price’s, and the eras of “Freaks,” “Nightmare Alley,” Roger Corman, Tod Browning, George Romero, William Castle and many others.

“The Offspring,” (MPAA-rated R, for sex and extreme violence) would be better without its gorier scenes--which are not well-handled and often sabotage the mood of eerie, DeToth-ian nastiness. But, then most recent horror movies would be better with less blood; for the film makers, as for Lady Macbeth, all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten their hands again.