Friday 23 May 2014

Legacy of Blood (1971)







There's a 1978 movie with this title and a very similar-sounding synopsis of IMDB, but I'm not sure if it's a remake of this or not.  The idea anyone thought this worth remaking seems odd, but then again maybe they just thought 'our version can't be any worse'?

This one starts with the reading of a dead man's will.  Or actually the playing of the audio tape on which it was recorded.  Seems the old coot wasn't too fond of his four kids, as his allotment of his estate comes with some pretty odd conditions: they must first spend a week together at his home, and only those who survive the experience will split the cash.  If they should all die ... well, then the servants get the dough.

The estate's worth about $140 million, so the siblings and their significant others (plus those servants) all settle in to meet the requirement.  And of course a week goes by quite peacefully so they all pocket $35 million --

Yeah, you didn't buy that, did you?

So of course we're in for some killing here.  Because that's what happens in movies with a premise like this.  The murders are pretty comical, actually.  Not intentionally so, I am sure, but they're just so artlessly staged that they ended up giving me the giggles.  I won't spoil the details of any of them.  It would rob you of what little pleasure the film has to offer.

Anyway, people are getting bumped off and it's really rather hard to care because they're all kind of obnoxious and the movie keeps interrupting itself with these surreal dream sequence things.  Eventually the cast is thinned out enough that we can move into the end game, and ... well it's about as underwhelming as you might expect, though it is topped with a final cherry of stupidity right at the end that literally had me staring open-mouthed at the screen.

Very nearly transcendentally awful.

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