On my first attempt at watching Blood Legacy, I had to hit the stop button after forty minutes or so: it was so dreadfully dull, I kept falling asleep. The following day, I sat down to finish what I had started, only to find I had no chapter selection and that the fast-forward didn't seem to work. Believe me when I say that seeing the first half hour of this rotten film for a second time—in order to get to the last part—was no walk in the park.
An unimaginative, shoddy, low-grade, piece of garbage, Blood Legacy opens with that tired old horror cliché, the reading of a will, which in this case stipulates that the greedy relatives and staff of recently deceased multi-millionaire Christopher Dean (John Carradine) must spend a week together in the family mansion before getting their hands on any cash. Of course, should anyone die during these seven days, their share of the inheritance will be divided between the others, a detail that provides more than enough motive for murder...
Among those due to benefit from Dean's demise: his four heirs, Laura (Merry Anders), Leslie (Brooke Mills), Johnny (Richard Davalos), and Veronica (Faith Domergue), all of whom have a few screws loose; creepy servants Elga (Ivy Bethune) and Igor (Buck Kartalian), who like to indulge in a spot of consensual beating; and chauffeur Frank (John Russell), who owns collection of military souvenirs, including a lampshade made from the remains of a German soldier he killed during the war.
Given this collection of suitably insane characters, and the film's sleazy themes of incest, sado-masochism, madness, and murder, it's hard to believe quite how boring this film actually is. Writer/director Carl Monson delivers scene after scene of inane chit-chat and irritating bickering between characters, leaving precious little time for the outrageous trashiness the premise demands. In fact, if it hadn't been for a smattering of cheesy gore (an axe-attack/decapitation and a guy having his face eaten by piranhas), plus the sight of buxom Brooke Mills constantly threatening to spill out of her night-dress, I might easily have fallen asleep again, meaning I would have had to suffer through the first part of the film for a third time ***shudder***!
An unimaginative, shoddy, low-grade, piece of garbage, Blood Legacy opens with that tired old horror cliché, the reading of a will, which in this case stipulates that the greedy relatives and staff of recently deceased multi-millionaire Christopher Dean (John Carradine) must spend a week together in the family mansion before getting their hands on any cash. Of course, should anyone die during these seven days, their share of the inheritance will be divided between the others, a detail that provides more than enough motive for murder...
Among those due to benefit from Dean's demise: his four heirs, Laura (Merry Anders), Leslie (Brooke Mills), Johnny (Richard Davalos), and Veronica (Faith Domergue), all of whom have a few screws loose; creepy servants Elga (Ivy Bethune) and Igor (Buck Kartalian), who like to indulge in a spot of consensual beating; and chauffeur Frank (John Russell), who owns collection of military souvenirs, including a lampshade made from the remains of a German soldier he killed during the war.
Given this collection of suitably insane characters, and the film's sleazy themes of incest, sado-masochism, madness, and murder, it's hard to believe quite how boring this film actually is. Writer/director Carl Monson delivers scene after scene of inane chit-chat and irritating bickering between characters, leaving precious little time for the outrageous trashiness the premise demands. In fact, if it hadn't been for a smattering of cheesy gore (an axe-attack/decapitation and a guy having his face eaten by piranhas), plus the sight of buxom Brooke Mills constantly threatening to spill out of her night-dress, I might easily have fallen asleep again, meaning I would have had to suffer through the first part of the film for a third time ***shudder***!