Offspring

Offspring plays off as a sort of pumped up version of many of the seventy soapies. It is indeed a thriller, the underlying motivations and reasons from the villianess revealed near it's finale. Hot looking daughter, Gaabrielle Fitzpatrick, is not a happy girl, especially at the request of her long lost stepmother/villainess, Rosa (Contouri, great here). She arrives at her estate with her co-star fiancé (Robert Mammone). We even see Chantal totally naked in one scene by the pool. Chantal even got Mammone's character's agent to call him. Driven by so much vengeful desire, Chantal's intent on these two not leaving her estate alive. We go back in Fitzpatrick's past, describing her stepmother as the devil, which I truly believed, when the shocking truth about Rosa became apparent. She's real a nasty pasty, a manipulator, at one stage turning the boyfriend against the stepdaughter, making her out as some sort of cook, where I think her character had a mental history too. We see some flashbacks of the daughter as a teen asked to do some weirdo stuff with her father and Rosa. There's way too much rambling dialogue, mostly concerning Fitzpatrick's past, which some of it so unbelievable, I had to cover my mouth to suppress my amusement. I even got the feeling Fitzpatrick, didn't believe some of it either at times. Yet still, I found this enjoyable as I did Chantal and the delicious Fitzpatrick.

This abomination of a movie fails to entertain on every level and contains no redeeming moments. It even fails to qualify as a slice of low budget kitsch and is less interesting than an episode of a poor afternoon soap opera. The majority of the film consists of the main character explaining her evil motives to her daughter in such long tedious scenes that you find yourself checking your watch and thinking about what you need from the supermarket during her endless diatribes. The script, which concerns itself entirely with exposition and zero action (in what is supposed to be a thriller) seems to have been written to enable the director to move the camera as little as possible during the interminable 83 minutes running time.

RECOMMENDED!