Source: IMDB.com
John Carradine is a raging asshole.
Wait, let me start over. Christopher Dean, played by John Carradine, is a raging asshole.
Having amassed a fortune of $140 million over the course of his hedonistic, sociopathic lifetime, Dean is finally where he belongs: dead and buried six feet under. Theoretically, he shouldn't be able to bother anyone ever again. But not even death can stop this raging asshole, so before he expired, Dean worked with his lawyer to play one last head game with his heirs.
Now gathered at his secluded estate for a reading of the will are Dean's four children, their spouses, and his three ever-faithful servants. Initially they are thrilled to learn that Dean, ever the miser while he was alive, has bequeathed his vast fortune to his next-of-kin and his hired help...until the lawyer reaches the twist. In order to claim the inheritance, the potential recipients must spend the night in Dean's mansion with the stipulation that if anyone dies, his or her portion of the inheritance will be split among the remaining survivors.
If this were any ordinary family reunion, there would be no problems: everyone would go to bed in their separate rooms, and each would awaken the next morning a millionaire. But Christopher Dean's legacy of verbal, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse towards his children and staff has left each of them a broken shell. As the sun sinks below the horizon, rivalries are re-kindled, old intra-familial dramas bubble to the surface, and it doesn't take long before someone decides an increased share of Christopher Dean's filthy lucre is worth severing some old family ties. Permanently.
Shot on the quick-and-dirty on a budget of just over $50,000, this cheapo production tries its best with what it's got to work with. As a story it's not so bad, and I'm sure in written form it reads differently from what plays out on the screen, but as a film even with the exploitation star power of John Carradine, Brooke Mills, Faith Domergue, and John Russell, it falls well short of what it should have been. There's a twist ending which reveals a character who we thought was dead is actually alive and well (shades of And Then There Were None, which this movie desperately wishes it was), but before we can even digest this, there's a double-cross anyone familiar with this kind of film should see coming a mile away, followed shortly by a triple-cross and a knowing, fourth-wall-shattering line of dialogue addressed to the viewers before the credits roll...all in the last five minutes of this movie's 90-minute run time.
Unfortunately, much of the middle crawls and languishes about with dream sequences, flashbacks, and mundane conversations between people who really don't seem to care that someone's bumping them off one at a time. It drags for far too long before revving the engines, but sadly by the time it does come roaring out of the garage, there's no driveway left and it metaphorically splats into a hedgerow as the tires spin pathetically.
There are some nice practical effects, including a severed head served on a platter and a corpse picked at by piranhas, and the spooky old mansion where virtually every scene of the film except the opening burial sequence is shot is a gorgeously effective location, decorated with all manner of kooky and outlandish props. Especially of note is the room John Russell's character Frank takes for his own, which is packed with old Nazi memorabilia, including a lamp made from a skull and human skin, and several German-era knives, pistols, and swastika-emblazoned ribbons. "Bizarre" doesn't begin to do this guy justice. While this could have been a nod to Russell's own service as a US Marine during World War II, if it is, it's something of a misfire -- Russell served in the Pacific theater, while Frank was a veteran of the European.
With a better eye towards pacing, this could have really made something out of it's Z-grade budget and B-list actors, but it's trying to deal with too much stuff in too short a time period to really make it work. Seriously, we've got homicide, revenge, incest, S&M, emotional breakdowns, drug abuse, psychological manipulation, and torture all on the menu, but they're thrown together willy-nilly with characters we hardly get to know before they get bumped off. Unfortunately, just like dear old dad, every member of the Dean clan and their live-in servants are crazy and impossible to relate to at best, or just plain monsters at worst. There's no real innocent here, no one worth cheering, and no one with whom the audience can form any real connection. Thus, with no reason to care about them, we're just watching a slightly more violent episode of any given random soap opera and smiling when we shouldn't be.
Legacy of Blood certainly isn't the worst picture I've ever sat through, and it intrigued me enough to both finish it and write it up afterwards, but there's little to recommend it. To a certain type of movie buff (the kind who would read The Psychotronic Video Guide, for instance), nothing I could say could dissuade you from seeking it out. This is a "good" bad movie, and as long as you're OK with that (or just want to see the absurdly beautiful, red-headed Brooke Mills who spends most of the film running around in her flimsy nightgown), you'll do just fine.
Those of you seeking anything akin to Hitchcock, Christie, or Shakespeare on the other hand? Well, you've been warned.
Legacy of Blood, despite being shot in 1971, appears to have suffered from the same copyright hitch that put Romero's Night of the Living Dead into the public domain, and it's never received a major-label release on VHS, DVD, or even LaserDisc. For that reason, I have no problem linking to a full version of it online:
