10 Horror Movie Rip-Offs You Won’t Believe Exist

Enormously influential, John Carpenter’s classic 1978 slasher Halloween still holds up as one of the greatest horror movies of all time, despite the vast number of sequels and baffling continuity issues (2018’s instalment is the eleventh movie in the franchise and the third to be simply entitled Halloween).

Well, Christopher Reynolds clearly thought so, judging by his decision to write, produce, edit and direct Offerings a decade after Carpenter’s original. Offerings is one of those so-bad-it’s-okay schlockfests beloved of horror fans across the globe, recently the recipient of an astonishingly good Blu-Ray transfer that almost makes it look like it was put together by professionals.

Reader, it was not. Everything here lifted from Halloween is awful: slow, amateurish and hackneyed. Funnily enough, it’s where Offerings strays from its rigid template that it starts to entertain, with some genuinely good comedic moments that actually land the way they were intended. You get the impression that had Reynolds gone for an out-and-out parody he could have delivered something memorable.

Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between. Reynolds may have pulled quadruple duty on his labour of love, but composer Russell D. Allen phoned it in – his soundtrack is literally just a slowed down version of the original’s iconic score. If it wasn’t obvious that this production had nothing in the bank, the lawsuit could have made Carpenter millions.

Meanwhile John Radley, the hulking slasher himself, is oddly sympathetic, a bullied kid from a broken, abusive home who is horribly injured, disfigured and brain damaged by the kids taunting him. Godawful mask aside (he looks like a waxwork Harry Dean Stanton), you do kind of end up rooting for the big lug.