Director: Andrew van den Houten
Screenplay: Jack Ketchum, based on the novel Offspring by Jack Ketchum
Starring: Pollyanna McIntosh, Art Hindle, Amy Hargreaves, Ahna Tessler, Jessica Butler, Andrew Elvis Miller, Eric Kastel, Tommy Nelson
Running Time: 79 minutes
Genre: Horror
Dead River is a picturesque coastal town in Maine, but is periodically plagued by attacks from a family of feral cannibals, who attack anyone unfortunate enough to cross their paths, and also sometimes attack homes, where they savagely murder the adults and abduct children. Their latest targets are young couple David (Miller) and Amy Halbard (Hargreaves) who live in a remote house with their baby. Sheltering with the Halbards is Amy's friend Claire (Tessler) and her eight year old son, Luke (Nelson), who are escaping Claire's abusive husband Stephen (Kastel).
This film is based on a 1990 novel by the late American horror author Dallas Mayr, who published under the pen-name Jack Ketchum, which itself was a sequel to his 1982 novel Off Season, which has yet to be made into a film, and there are several references in the movie to a previous adventure involving the cannibal clan. This is a very low budget film, and it is technically quite rough, and it looks as if it was made much earlier than 2009. Some of the performances are variable as well. The film bears quite strong similarities to movies such as The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Wrong Turn (2003), but it works in it's own right. The characters are fairly well drawn, particularly the cannibals themselves, who are more than just monsters. They have personalities, and are acting according to their own survival instincts. This is a disturbing film, it's very violent and gruesome, and it is very bleak, a recurring theme in Ketchum's work is that the seemingly "normal" people are as potentially monstrous as the more obviously "monstrous" characters, and the ending hints at more horrors to come.
Pollyanna McIntosh, who plays the matriarch of the cannibal clan, returned to the role in the 2011 sequel The Woman, directed by Lucky McKee, and Darlin' (2019), which McIntosh also wrote and directed.
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