Legacy of Blood

Legacy of Blood is pretty much your typical Andy Milligan film; poorly produced, badly acted and very boring. This film is something of a remake of Milligan's earlier film; the very boring, poorly acted and produced 'Video Nasty' Blood Rites, and does nothing to improve on its predecessor. The film has pretty much nothing in the way of credibility, and while rubbish like this can sometimes be enjoyable; that isn't an adjective I would use to describe this film. It actually took me three sittings to make it all the way through, as the first two times I switched it off before reaching the ten minute mark. The plot follows three women who travel to a secluded mansion with their husbands for a reading of a will left by the father they barely knew. They then start getting picked off by an anonymous killer. The film features a handful of nasty death scenes, but strangely for Milligan; they're all rather tame and we don't get to see much. Hitchcock said less is more, but in this case it really isn't as it just makes Legacy of Blood even more of a non-event. Overall, there's nothing to recommend this (or Blood Rites) for, and by missing it, you're missing nothing.

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.

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.

...and their husbands aren't particularly "unsavory" either. Who the heck wrote the description blurb for Legacy of Blood? It's a mediocre low budget flick but none of the sisters struck me as especially odious.

This film's value largely lies in it being a piece of sociological or historical interest. The story itself is pretty confusing for the first 20-30 minutes they don't even explain who all of these people are.

The time period is also a bit off. At one point Margaret is wearing a skirt short enough to suggest the 1930s at earliest, and the three sisters mostly dress like it's the 1920s or 30s. On the other hand, the sister Mary dresses like it's 1915 which could just be a quirk...except something happens later in the film to suggest that the film is ostensibly taking place around the turn of the 20th century.

Meh.

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)!