The Vincent Price Movie Review

aka From a Whisper to a Scream
Released in 1987
Directed by Jeff Burr

The Offspring is a horror anthology movie from the late 1980’s that Vincent Price starred in at the tail end of his career. It’s the last horror movie he made, in fact. The Offspring is in the similar vein as other horror anthologies of the 80’s like Creepshow and Tales From the Crypt which feature sordid characters and twist endings. The largest difference is that The Offspring does not offer any lighthearted black comedy; it’s gruesome and unrelenting.

The movie is made up of four separate story segments that each take place in the same town of Oldfield Tennessee, but at different periods in time. The segments are wrapped together by another story that stars Vincent Price as the narrator of the tales. Price plays Julian White, a chronicler of Oldfield’s lurid history who relates the horrible stories to a visiting journalist that is covering the execution of Julian’s niece. Even though there isn’t much of a purpose to the wrapper story besides narration, it’s kind of nice to see a horror anthology that actually ties all the separate elements together in some way.

Since each of the segments in this film have a twist ending, I will try to refrain from spoiling the fun by limiting the details of my review.

The first segment stars veteran actor Clu Gulager as Stanley Burnside, who is a creepy guy that lives with his invalid sister in their old family house. Most of the segment deals with Stanley’s desire to court one of his female coworkers, and his subsequent inability to cope with the rejection amid hints of incest. I found that I enjoyed this segment mostly due to Gulager’s portrayal of Stanley. The performance of Miriam Byrd-Nethery, his wife in the film and in real life, was equally creepy. You’ll probably be wondering what the twist ending is by the time you get towards the end of the story because nothing is really withheld from the viewer up to that point. Let me just say that this movie was made in the late 80’s during the days of the cute monster horror movies like Ghoulies and Gremlins.

Moving on…

The second segment is probably my favorite out of all four. It opens with a sleazy guy named Jesse Hardwick(Terry Kiser) being ambushed in his trailer by a couple of heavies who are shooting to kill. In his frantic escape attempt he gets shot up pretty bad, but manages to make it to a boat at the edge of a swamp. He wakes up several days later in a shack owned by a hermit who lives there in the swamp. Despite being grievously injured, he survives and learns more about the peculiar old guy who saved him. While the old hermit is out hunting for mushrooms one night, Jesse discovers a journal that leads him to believe the hermit is over a hundred years old and possesses the secret to everlasting life. After secretly watching the hermit perform some witchcraft ceremonies, Jesse believes he has found the ingredients that grant the power over death. He asks the old man to teach him the secret, but gets frustrated when the hermit seems to be only showing him phony tricks instead of the real thing. Being the treacherous degenerate that he is, Jesse tries to murder the old man and steal his potions, but you can’t murder someone who is immune to death. Jesse finds out that there are fates worst than death, however.

The third segment is a somewhat bizarre story about a group of circus freaks. The circus is run by a magic-using circus master, who actually grants the freaks’ powers. She also uses her magic as a threat against the circus workers who want to escape. The story focuses on one particular freak called the Glass Eater. This is the guy who eats glass, of course, but he also munches on nails, razorblades, and other sharp objects. After he falls in love with a young girl, the Glass Eater tries to escape from the circus to be with his lover. The circus master finds out, and decides to enact some extremely gory punishment on both of them. Let’s just say the Glass Eater certainly ate a lot of sharp objects during his tenure, but he didn’t necessarily digest all of them. The story ends on an upside: his girlfriend gets a new job at the circus.

I liked this third story the least out of the four. The acting is pretty weak.

The last segment goes back in time to the civil war period, when Oldfield was just being founded. I think the premise is interesting and somewhat terrifying. Imagine travelling to the war-torn South, and stumbling upon a small town where there are no inhabitants but children; all the adults have been killed in the war. Having witnessed the full brutality of war, the children are so traumatized and desensitized to violence that they use dead soldiers’ body parts as toys to play with. I realize this theme has been tried many times with Children of the Corn, etc, but I find this particular story has more impact because it actually could have happened. (or at least certain aspects of it)

Even though Vincent Price doesn’t have much to do in his last horror movie, I would still recommend giving it a try. Be aware that this is 1980’s horror material here…there’s definitely a cheese-factor mixed with a fair amount of gore.

If you are trying to find this on DVD it will be titled From a Whisper to a Scream.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Later Years. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.