Legacy of Blood (1978)

Such a frustrating disappointment

I wanted to but couldn't!

Excellent but underrated film

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Mr Dean (John Carradine) dies and in his will he stipulates his children must stay in his mansion for one week to get a share of the inheritance, children that he had a hate-hate relationship. The film becomes a 10 little Indians with the killer being too obvious.Bad acting. In one scene a woman is drying off with a towel while wearing a towel. There is a Philadelphia Eagles pennant above the door in one room while another room had a swastika...filmed on Staten Island, go figure.Guide: No swearing, sex, or nudity. Some kinky beating, implied incest.

I will say this film is just "OK". Not the world's worst horror film - I've seen far worse than this film. But I have seen much better horror films from the 1970s. That leaves this one in the middle.Basically we have a rich uncle that dies and he leaves a will. His 3 nieces and their husbands show up for the reading of the will. All of them that want a part of the inheritance must stay in the house for 3 days - isolated from the rest of the world. One by one they are bumped off by an unknown killer. Who is the killer? While you might easily guess who the killer is in this stereo-typical plot - the film is good for some Z-grade giggles.The movie is worth about 4 stars to me but I did get a kick out of watching the film and John Carradine is in the movie so it gets a couple of extra stars from me.6/10

Milligan had made some wonderful "z-grade" horror films about ten years before this dud. Torture Dungeon, Ghastly Ones, Guru the Mad Monk, Bloodthirsty Butchers; these were the golden years for Milligan's thrillers. By the time he had made this film, he was only a stone's throw away from his excruciating Poltergeist knock-off, Carnage. In fact, Legacy of Blood itself seems to be cribbed from an identically titled Carl Monson film released earlier in the decade. I've never seen that one, but if there is no connection, then what we have here is yet another mysterious coincidence as had happened with the two Naked Witch films in the 60s. If you do view this film, make sure you see the others I mentioned first, especially The Ghastly Ones and Bloodthirsty Butchers.

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.