Jeu de famille

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.

"Blood Relations" is a truly bizarre horror film.Stunningly beautiful Lydie Denier is being brought home by rich Kevin Hicks.She meets surgeon dad Jan Rubes and together with the son they plan to kill dad and get a huge inheritance.But soon we learn dad and son are quite mad...The film is occasionally truly creepy and weird-the performances are very good and believable.There is almost no gore,but the film definitely works as an atmospheric Gothic shocker.Overlooked classic and a must-see for horror fans!

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.

An average horror movie with excellent shots, that sometimes really scares you. If you pay good attention is the plot not really so surprising. The whole film takes place in one house, and has a 19th century baroque sphere.

"Blood Relations" follows a young woman (Lydie Denier) who accompanies her boyfriend to his rich family's estate in the dead of winter. Her encounters with his estranged father (Jan Rubes), a brain surgeon, become increasingly strange, and the family's dark secrets start to emerge.

While certainly not an accomplished masterwork, "Blood Relations" is an atmospheric psychological horror movie that has the temperament of a hard-edged Lifetime TV movie from the early-1990s. What works about it is that it boasts an atmospheric setting, a number of moody nighttime sequences, and a twisty plot that keeps the viewer in "what is going here?" territory.

The film mostly plays like a sordid V. C. Andrews-adjacent family drama until the final act, where it becomes a full-fledged horror movie. It does rely on a number of repetitive sequences that are portrayed ambiguously (as in they could be dreams, or they may in fact be real), which wears thin. That being said, the grim denouement packs enough of a punch that I found myself mildly applauding the film for going for the jugular. The performances here are middling at best, though Jan Rubes is effective as the dubious and sinister patriarch.

All in all, "Blood Relations" is a minor effort with a TV-movie feel, but it does get progressively darker as it moves toward its conclusion. It is a decent horror flick with enough idiosyncrasies and moodiness that warrant a viewing from genre fans. 6/10.