REVIEW

TLA Guide:
Six strangers are invited to a remote English mansion when they suddenly begin dying off. A supernatural presence is in the air and is using the process of elimination to select an heir. This Omen-inspired horror tale lacks suspense or a plot but tries to make up for it with gore and nonsense.

Danger After Dark:
For horror film buffs, there’s something genuinely encouraging about the seasonal Halloween practice wherein Hollywood studios comb their film vaults for neglected genre titles to release on DVD. This tends to bring some horror gems to digital light each year, and for this, devotees of the genre are thankful. Then again, this practice is also responsible for providing additional public exposure to something like The Legacy (1978). I had not personally seen this film prior to its recent DVD debut, and I apologize if I’m offending any longtime fans (?) of this particular project, but I have to inquire, in all seriousness: was there really one single person on the face of this cursed planet who actually wanted to see this appallingly dull, dire, depressingly mundane endeavor released to DVD? Unless one lost their virginity at a drive-in while this film unspooled in the background, I can’t envision any reason why anyone would ever wish to revisit this sleep-inducing drivel.

Made during the period when major Hollywood studios were exploring the possibilities of “classy” up-market horror following the 1970s successes of The Exorcist and The Omen, The Legacy is one of those desperate projects so far removed from what most horror fans would even consider the genre to be, that it scarcely seems like a horror movie at all: more akin to a tired television melodrama with vague supernatural elements, the film is much like a horror movie made for people who really don’t want to see a horror movie.

The story revolves around an American couple (blank-eyed Stepford wife Katherine Ross and her obnoxious lover Sam Elliott, who seems determined to fulfill every lunkheaded cliché about the rude American) arriving in rural England, and then trapped in a predictably sinister estate and embroiled in the machinations of a demonic cult.

For some reason, quite a few of these 70s big-budget Hollywood faux-horror snore-a-thons tended to be directed by aging British hacks who took time out from pickling their livers and fellating Oliver Reed to lazily helm these uninspired genre detours (see also – or please don’t – Michael Winner and The Sentinel, Mike Newell and The Awakening, et al); The Legacy is no exception, but it’s astonishing to note that, on the basis of this film, Richard Marquand was given the assignment to direct Return of the Jedi only a few years later. Any movie wherein Roger Daltrey choking on a chicken bone actually comprises the film’s highlight is not one which should be the building block to a greater career, no?