Director: Carl Monson
Writers: Eric Norden from a story by Carl Monson
From: Drive-In
Watch: Elvira’s Movie Macabre (via ShoutFactoryTV)
A hate-filled patriarch dies, leaving his substantial fortune to his servants and children, with one condition: the money will be evenly split among the survivors. As bodies start piling up, it’s clear someone doesn’t want to share.
We open on the solicitor playing a reel-to-reel recording of John Carradine reciting his will. To each of his three servants he leaves a million dollars to be paid out at the rate of $500/week as long as they continue to work at the house. To each of his four children, who he notes how much he hates, he leaves the rest of his fortune to be evenly divided among them. The reason he doesn’t leave them nothing is we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise.
He chose poorly.
The only stipulation is they have to live in the house for a week and anyone who leaves (or dies) will have their share split among the survivors. If all the children leave/die, the servants split the inheritance.
With a set-up like that, we should be off to the races with the siblings being wary of each other and of the staff. Instead, there’s a shrugging sense of “Whatta prick!” and everyone generally hangs out.
Even though the will stipulated that they all stay there for a week, things start happening that night because why develop suspense in a horror flick? First, a couple’s dog is killed. The sheriff is called to investigate and then gets murdered himself. The siblings find his severed head in the fridge, freak out, then discover that the phone lines have been cut and all the cars have been disabled. The eldest brother says, “It’s getting to be like some kind of horror film.”
Yes. A boring one.
The rest of the movie is people get killed one-by-one. They should all start getting suspicious of each other, but they never really do. We get some backstory involving incest and BDSM and thwarted romances that’s all supposed to be very sordid but is all played off with a shrugging nonchalance.
Anyway, bodies pile up, the killer is revealed in a twist, the killer is betrayed in a further twist, and we end with yet another twist and a character making a joke while directly addressing the audience and winking. THE END.
The whole work is just dull. Fortunately, it’s hilariously dull. One brother looks alternately like a fit Joe Don Baker or a bloated Arch Hall Jr. and Igor, the butler (named “Igor” for Chrissakes!), looks like a roided out Mel Brooks. One sister is hamming it up when her character’s not catatonic and her psychologist husband is generally being a smarmy prick. On top of that, there are a few hilarious deaths. A couple is electrocuted in bed looking like they’re pretending to be sex dolls and someone else is killed by bees.
I want to linger on the bee death for a moment. The character is suspected of being the killer and so gets tied up and locked in a room. The real killer arrives, throws a beehive in, and closes the door again. Other people in the house hear the victim screaming, open the door, and find the victim horribly stung, covered in bees, and not dead. Then they close the door! The victim isn’t dead, but they do nothing to try to save them or get rid of the bees. They literally look at the victim, go, “Oh,. Oh dear,” and seal them back up with the bees. Hilarious.
This film had echos of The Ghost in terms of a seemingly haunted house and a killer scheming for an inheritance as well as a Bela Lugosi murder-comedy I watched during the second part of the PD Project, One Body Too Many. Lugosi plays a butler who’s always trying to get people to eat some cookies. It’s just a running gag in the background, but part of this movie reminded me of One Body Too Many. That is, also, a better movie and I recommend that over Legacy of Blood.
To Legacy’s credit, the film is in the public domain. Unfortunately, my copy has Mill Creek graffiti on it so I can’t upload it to archive.org. On top of that, there doesn’t seem to be a copy on the Internet Archive at all. However, the movie was featured on Elvira’s Movie Macabre and, as of this writing, is streaming via ShoutFactoryTV. The movie was also featured as an episode of Cinematic Titanic.
On its own, the movie is too dull to recommend. Nothing particularly dramatic happens, but also nothing particularly gory. It’s best enjoyed with sarcastic friends eager to riff something. The dullness of the film has a way of highlighting the absurdity of everything, and that’s always helpful when trying to laugh.
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