Jeu de famille

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...

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" 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.

I wasn't expecting much, if anything, from this film but my interests was really peaked by it when checking out this page before I started watching. I was surprised to see so many positive comments for Blood Relations before seeing the film - and even more surprised afterwards as this is a boring mess of a movie and I'm surprised anyone could find anything good to say about it! The story is not exactly original and focuses on a dysfunctional family. We follow a young girl who comes home to her family and ends up getting mixed up in a web of murder etc. The film is quite trippy as a result of the numerous drug induced dream sequences, but it's difficult to really care about anything that goes on and that constantly hinders it. The film's one saving grace comes in the shapely form of Lydie Denier in the central role, who provides the film with some much needed eye candy. I'm guessing this is meant to be a 'serious' horror film rather than a campy one, though it's very cheap and the scares, if intended, do really miss the mark. Overall, this is not a good or memorable film and since it is quite obscure anyway, I wouldn't recommend anyone purposefully seeks it out.

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.