Thursday, May 1, 2008

The Horror!? 57: Legacy of Blood (1971)

Multimillionaire Christopher Dean dies and leaves his dysfunctional family and his equally disturbed servants with a slightly eccentric will: To qualify for a share of the legacy they have to live together for a week at the remote family mansion. The money will be shared between the survivors. And the survival of the flock seems doubtful even before a killer starts to pick them off one by one, since their dysfunctions include incest, sadism, masochism, alcoholism and lamps made out of dead nazis.
The best thing about sitting down on my couch, slapping a DVD into the player and watching a movie is the excitement if and when the film reaches a state of transcendence. When it stops being a mere movie and becomes something organic, possibly even alive. There are a few ways a movie can reach this mystical wholeness, one of them, the way Legacy of Blood chooses, is by being so inexplicably bad and weird that I just can't imagine how someone, anyone in his/her/its right mind could ever have thought making it was a good or at least sane idea. There is absolutely nothing right with this movie, the acting is unbelievable, the direction does nothing right, the cutting dissolves the film into moments that just don't fit. The script defies human description, and laughs at human comprehension. The most bizarre dialogue is uttered in ways I never thought possible. It's as if the proverbial monkeys had left their typewriters to try and make it in Hollywood.
Now, after I cried, after I laughed, after I stared in disbelief, after I tried to hide, after I succumbed to the seduction of the anti-sense equation, I finally understand what Hassan-i Sabbah meant when he spoke: "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."

Darling of the Day:
"I think we're alone inside this patchwork of insanity."

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