Blood Legacy aka Legacy of Blood aka Will to Die (Carl Monson, 1971)

This many-titled, mostly terrible, and oddly entertaining early '70s curiosity begins with the disembodied voice of Christopher Dean (John Carradine) reading his will from beyond the grave. His surviving children, their spouses, and the household servants are gathered at Papa Dean's sprawling mansion to hear a recording of the will played by his amused and unfriendly lawyer. The Dean patriarch spends most of the will trash-talking his sons and daughters in adjectivally hilarious purple prose (my favorite insult being "dreadful scions wrought from my loins during four insane moments of my life"), and he gets a few digs in at his servants as well. It's like a Friar's Club roast of an entire family by a dead guy. Old Chris Dean, it seems, was a pretty eccentric man, but he's practically normcore compared to his insanely weirdo kids, in-laws, and servants.

More about them later, but first, the inheritance. The three servants -- Igor the butler, Elga the maid, and Frank the handyman -- get a million bucks each, provided they stay at the house and keep doing their jobs. The Deans -- Gregory, Leslie, Veronica, and Johnny -- are to split the rest of the vast fortune in equal shares, with a few catches. If anyone dies, the survivors (including surviving spouses) split it all, the last survivor gets everything that's left (this includes the servants), and the entire group has to spend the next seven days in the mansion. As you can probably guess, people start dying.

Now about these weirdos. Brother Gregory is the most well-adjusted of the Dean siblings. His only problems are his raging alcoholism and his refusal to listen to his nervous wife Laura's uneasy concerns about the house and the freakazoids inside it. Sister Veronica also seems to be holding it together pretty well. She keeps a sarcastic remove from the horrors of life and has everyone's number, but she starts breaking down as the bodies pile up. She also has a cold yet flirtatious not-quite-rapport with her brother-in-law Carl and a messy romantic history with handyman Frank. The aforementioned Carl is a sleazy pop psychologist who is extremely controlling of his wife, sister Leslie. Carl keeps trying to get in Veronica's pants and keeps getting shut down. He appears to have married Leslie for the inheritance. Leslie is totally bonkers, a childish, needy, and tripped-out space cadet who spends most of the film banished to her bedroom by husband Carl. Carl won't let rockabilly-pompadoured, leather-jacketed, and sunglasses-wearing bad boy, brother Johnny, see Leslie, but that's probably for the best. Johnny and Leslie had an incestuous fling years ago when in the grips of double madness, and they're still creepily obsessed with each other. Johnny soon drops his rockabilly bad boy veneer and completely loses his shit, hallucinating traumatic childhood moments and downing brandy after brandy while crying and pounding on the walls. 

The servants are the only ones holding the mansion together, but they have some issues of their own. Elga seems reasonably sane despite the occasional homicidal glint in the eye, but she's shacked up with Igor, a creepy little sadomasochist who loves being flogged to the point of injury and beyond. He's a high-strung fella. Frank is a deep-voiced hyper-macho car-fixing self-sufficient old-fashioned American male, despite his wildly ostentatious cravat. He's got his dark side, though. World War II did a number on him, and his room is decorated with Nazi memorabilia and a weird-looking lamp with a skull for a base. "A Kraut stuck me with a bayonet, so I made a lamp out of him," Frank explains. He wasn't kidding. Not sure how he got the human skin/skull lamp back to the States, but I'll leave that to the Dean family fanfic crowd. By the way, the woman who plays Elga, Ivy Bethune, is one of only two cast members still living, and she turned 100 just a few weeks ago. 

So. Blood Legacy or Legacy of Blood or Will to Die. In conclusion, junior high book report style, I enjoyed the wildly over-emotive acting, strange dialogue, and pervasive atmosphere of weirdness. The film gets plenty of mileage out of a foil-wrapped ham that keeps getting pulled out of the refrigerator, for example. It's no great shakes visually, with director Carl Monson exhibiting a mostly pedestrian style. When he stumbles onto a shot he thinks is neat, he repeats it three or four more times. That's about all you get for a directorial signature. This is not a good movie, but it's weird and fun, made even more fun by its distribution on DVD as an Elvira, Mistress of the Dark presentation. Watching it with an intro, outro, and multiple interruptions from Elvira really kicked the viewing experience up a notch and took me right back to being a kid in the '80s. Until next time, keep your loved ones close and your hams closer.