Blood Relations

Young lovers Thomas (Kevin Hicks) and Marie (Lydie Denier) plot to kill Thomas's neurosurgeon father Andreas in order to inherit a fortune from Thomas's grandfather Charles (Ray Walston), who is close to popping his clogs.

For much of its runtime, Blood Relations plays like one of those made-for-cable erotic thrillers that used to play late at night - softcore porn for post-pub perverts, with sexy star Denier shedding all of her clothes several times, even giving lucky old Walston an eyeful.

But as drop dead gorgeous as Denier is, the film proves extremely tedious for much of the time, the pedestrian thriller-lite script providing very little to get excited about - at least until the final act, when things improve considerably, the plot entering mad scientist horror territory, with cranial surgery and brain removal aplenty, as Andreas tries to transplant his wife's brain into Marie's very lovely body.

I enjoyed the heck out of the crazy last ten minutes!

BLOOD RELATIONS starts out like an erotically-charged thriller, turns into a mystery, then winds up in full-blown horror territory. Nothing is as it appears to be, as the story takes several quick, off-kilter turns.

Lydie Denier is the increasingly perplexed Marie, who slowly uncovers the family secrets that will cost her dearly. Kevin Hicks is Thomas, Marie's unpredictable fiance. Jan Rubes plays Andreas, the extremely friendly, possibly unbalanced patriarch of this little psychodrama. There are definitely some hidden parts to his personality!

This movie is twisted, bizarre, and in the end, utterly satisfying...

It took some time to really get going, but once it did, I was rather pleased. It's so refreshing to see things that you'll never find in a mainstream film. There were things in this movie that were downright sick, and yet those were the parts that I enjoyed the most. The setup was perhaps a little slow, but the finale was one that I won't soon forget. It's not for all tastes, but if you can enjoy films that are more than a little warped, then it is truly worth seeing.

A woman stays with her fiancé at his father's mansion. The father is a brain surgeon, or at least a brain surgery hobbyist - he has a surgery room in the basement. Her fiancé's ill grandfather also lives in the house. The father and grandfather seem to be interested in her at least as much as her fiancé.

Lydie Denier is beautiful, but apart from her beauty, the film is really quite the bad one. It is boring and uneventful. She gets drugged several times by drinks, and doesn't wise up to that. She has odd drug-induced hallucinations or dreams, or perhaps merely witnesses odd things relating to the surgeon and his supposedly late wife.

Avoid this one. I'd be curious to see something better with Denier in it, though.

I rented this movie totally by mistake thinking it was Claude Chabrol's "Blood Relatives", but it didn't turn out to be a TOTAL waste of a rental fee. It's kind of an early "erotic thriller", but unlike those films it doesn't let itself get totally overwhelmed by long sex scenes and actually does function somewhat as an inheritance thriller with some horror movie scenes involving graphic brain surgery thrown in for good measure.

French actress Lydie Dernier was living proof that you didn't need to be able to act or even pronounce the English language if you were willing to doff all your duds in any piece of crap movie defecated by the low-budget Hollywood film industry. This is definitely a step up from "Satan's Princess" (and let's not even speak of that movie she was in Robbie Benson). Naturally Lydie takes her clothes off a lot, and this is the only film I know of(aside from that dubbed late-night Ursula Andress cable classic "The Sensuous Nurse")where a woman seduces a son, a father, AND a grandfather (the latter played by the late, great Ray Walston).

Would I have rented this intentionally? Well, no. But I have now wasted five minutes of my (admittedly pathetic)life reviewing it, so I guess I can't say its THAT bad.