Blood Relations

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.

"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!

You know you're about to watch a very unusual film when, during the first 10 or so minutes already, a passionate love-making sequences is montaged together with footage of an open brain-surgery. The weirdness continues when an adult son, with the persuasive help of his new girlfriend, decides to play a prank on the father by pretending to have slit his wrists and lay dead in a bloodied bathtub. Nice! Nothing says "dysfunctional family" like tasteless and downright shocking jokes, I guess!

Now, I have no idea how "Blood Relations" ended up on my must-see list, but there's definitely something oddly compelling about this late 80s Canadian horror/exploitation effort! Three generations of men (and a gardener) live together in their large and secluded family mansion. Grandfather lies nearly dead in his bedroom, the pervy father is a renowned brain surgeon who may or may not killed his wife to inherit her fortune, and the twenty-something son is plotting a scheme to eliminate his father and get his inheritance much quicker and all for himself. In the middle of all this is the stunningly beautiful Marie; - the son Thomas' girlfriend and accomplice, but she's playing her part of seductress very convincingly.

Admittedly there isn't a lot of horror in "Blood Relations", but this widely gets compensated by nudity, erotic atmosphere, and a whole lot of wicked strangeness. For example, I don't recall having seen many other films in which a girl gets down and dirty with the son, his father, and his grandfather! Well, what can you do when a dying old man's last wish is to strip naked and give kisses? The denouement is odd and largely unsatisfying. Mostly odd, though. To be honest, I guessed the ending right halfway through the movie, but then rapidly forgot the idea because it was just too silly and far-fetched. Not silly enough for this crew, apparently.

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!