Legacy of Blood

Andy Milligan has something of a twisted reputation among bad film buffs as producing inept low-budget gore. This flick is a slightly more competent remake of an earlier film Milligan conceived called THE GHASTLY ONES. The plots both films share is this: a trio of sisters, along with their husbands, travel to the family mansion for the reading of the late father's will. The sisters stand to inherit a substantial fortune, but someone plans to kill them before they can stay the prescribed weekend in the house, and various gory murders ensue. Milligan tried both with period settings, 1905 for the first and circa 1920 for the latter, and the remake fares better in terms of accurate period detail. Also, Milligan takes more care to develop the characters and their relationships with each other. Also, the two sisters who care for the mansion and their retarded brother are given more development, most noticably in the brother, originally a rabbit-eating geek in the first, is portrayed as a sad waste of human potential in the second. The sight of this simpleton crouching in his squalid basement room, punching a teddy bear over and over while babbling, "Stupid, stupid" is more chilling than any disemboweling. While not a great film, it stands head and shoulders above it's predecessor. And nobody hacks up a single mannequin this time around.

I could order Milligan's celebrated The Ghastly Ones over the internet for twenty dollars. Or, I could find his hated and chopped up remake, Legacy of Horror, in the bargain bin for two dollars. The latter worked for me, and while it made me badly want to see the original, I still enjoyed Legacy of Horror.

It's got some of Milligan's outrageously gay acting characters. Almost all the characters are pretty flamboyant making the production come off as a bit silly, but over-the-top is how it's meant to be. The story is strong, even if some of the sub-plots go nowhere. I'd have loved it if it were not so obviously missing spots of gore. I'm surprised that something released by Gorgon video would be ever censored.

In traditional Agatha Christie style, family members gather at the home of their spinster relatives and their mentally challenged brother to find out who got what in the will and are killed off, one by bloody one.

Even at under 90 minutes, Legacy of Blood drags with seemingly endless scenes of people talking about nothing of importance intercut with a few instances of gore.

Nor did the director, or, anyone else for that matter, go to film school. It's lit like all they had was a single light. The film stock used is cheap and the wrong speed (sensitivity to light) and half the time looks completely overexposed. The script totally stinks. The only thing of quality was the gunshot one character took to the head (it's the only thing anybody put any effort into)!

What is it that makes directors want to remake their own films? Tod Browning did it with OUTSIDE THE LAW (once in 1921 and again in 1930) and London AFTER MIDNIGHT (the famous lost film of 1927 and the remake MARK OF THE VAMPIRE in 1935). Andy Milligan, Staten Island's own gore master, did it when he remade the 1969 movie THE GHASTLY ONES (1969) as LEGACY OF HORROR.

The plot was nothing new, three women gather to hear the Last Will of the father they barely knew. They are each promised a fortune if they and their husbands will stay for 3 days in an isolated house on a lonely island. Hardly have they settled in when a black hooded killer starts roaming the corridors decreasing the number of potential heiresses. Don't you just hate when that happens?

The killer is so obvious you'd have to be deaf and blind to miss him (oh wait, I said that in my review of THE GHASTLY ONES, didn't I? Well, it applies in this movie too!) but several people are brutally slain. Oh, speaking of that, Andy's gore effects have not changed a bit since the earlier film. If anything, in this remake they are even tamer! The man sawed in half is shown mostly in shadow, Andy's old "pitchfork to the throat" mainstay is suggested rather than shown, and the hand amputation goes by so fast you likely to wonder what happened. If you saw the original you already know who the killer is and what happens at the end so I won't go into it here.

Of course there are the usual Milligan-ism's; most notably the movie takes place shortly after the turn of the 20th century and yet we see a gardener working with a plastic rake. Sorely missed is Hal Borske as Colin, the halfwit servant. The fellow in this film tries hard but but I just don't see the sincerity in the role that Hal gave. Maggie Rogers was missed also.

Andy Milligan was a dear friend of mine and I will watch anything he did because it is fun. LEGACY OF HORROR, though, is not as much fun as THE GHASTLY ONES.