The Legacy

A typically loony English-country-house horror from the pen of Jimmy Sangster, which dumps its statutory American leads (Katharine Ross and Sam Elliott) into a hardly-stirred plot-pot of diabolic conspiracy - and slowly congeals. In other words, the legacy in question is really the British industry's continuing forlorn attempt to crack the international market with a 'nowhere' story of an England where everything stops for tea, a Rolls prowls the leafy lanes, devoted rustic retainers do little but dispose of untidy corpses, and the dark family secret resides upstairs. And the true curse is that an actor of the calibre of Ian Hogg is limited to scowling from beneath a chauffeur's cap, and Charles Gray and Lee Montague have to affect hilarious Euro-accents, while the very presence of the Hollywood 'names' (plus a dreadful Roger Daltrey cameo) turns a hackneyed script into a 'package' with 'potential'. Horror, indeed.