Cult movie fans all over the world know how Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark is. The insanely buxom horror hostess thrilled audiences for years on TV, introducing horror films both good and bad on her late night Movie Macabre show, the success of which made Cassandra Peterson's alter ego quite the star. She'd go on to star in her comic book spin offs and even a feature length film and now her old horror host bits have found new life through the wonder of DVD. This time out, the movie is Carl Monson's 1971 melodramatic horror film, Legacy Of Blood (we should probably call it Blood Legacy so as not to confuse it with the Andy Milligan film of the same name from 1978), which has appeared before on a handful of low budget public domain compilations.

When the extremely wealthy patriarch of a well off family passes away named Christopher Dean (horror and b-movie legend, John Carradine), he leaves everything to be divided equally between the four remaining members of his immediate family, those being Greg (Jeff Morrow of This Island Earth), Laura (Merry Anders of House Of The Damned), Johnny (Richard Davalos of Kelly's Heroes) and Victoria (Faith Domergue also of This Island Earth) as well as their respective spouses. There's one condition, however – they have to spend a week together in his old house before they can have their share of the loot. He also states that if for some reason the four of them are to perish that the money should be divided up among the three servants that he'd employed before he died – Igor (Buck Cartalian of Planet Of The Apes), Elga (Ivy Bethune) and Frank (John Russell of Rio Bravo).

Things start to get ugly when a visit from the local sheriff (Rodolfo Acosta of John Ford's The Fugitive) results in a decapitation and a family dog gets killed. This sets things into motion and before you know it, one by one the family members are being picked off in increasingly grisly fashion. The one hundred and forty million dollar question is, of course, who is behind it all? The motive is obvious, whoever is killing of the family members wants the money, but is it a relative, a servant or someone else entirely? It all builds quite slowly to a pretty predictable conclusion followed by an equally predictable twist ending.

Legacy Of Blood commits the carnal sin of horror movie making – it's boring. It takes too long to get going and once it does, the pay off just isn't worth it. The characters are pretty unlikable which would be fine if the script made things interesting but it doesn't and instead what we're left with is a cross between The Old Dark House and a bad Scooby-Doo cartoon with some piss poor gore effects thrown in every now and then to try and cover up the fact that the movie really isn't very interesting. Director and co-writer Carl Morson would go on to direct Please Don't Eat My Mother with porno starlet Rene Bond in a supporting role which he would again share writing duties on with Eric Norden. It's considerably more entertaining than this turkey, which is only really useful if you're looking for a cure for insomnia.

Video:

This fullframe presentation is in really rough shape. There is print damage present all through the movie, sometimes more severe than others, and it's particularly noticeable during the opening credits. The colors are pretty faded as well, which sucks some of the life out of the image during key scenes. Despite the abundance of scratches and debris, the image is still watchable most of the time but there's obviously not been any effort put into fixing any of the issues here.