When Margaret Walsh (Katherine Ross) gets a job offer across the pond for work that’s unclear and an employer that’s no clearer, she’s ecstatic. It’s $50,000 after all, and a chance for her and her lover Pete Danner (Sam Elliott) to take a trip, see some sights in the ten days prior to the work. That sounds lovely, but when the two lovebirds are motorcycling through the English countryside, they encounter a Rolls Royce going the opposite direction on far too narrow of a road … The crash does not yield any fatalities, though the bike is trashed. The driver Harry (Ian Hogg) and the wealthy passenger Jason Mountolive (John Standing) are overflowing with apologies and helpfulness. The latter offers to host the couple at his estate until their bike can be repaired, and the pair grudgingly agree.
Ravenhurst is a massive manor set upon rolling grounds. It has servants galore, and no shortage of secrets. Chief among the former (and bearer of the latter) is Nurse Adams (Margaret Tyzack) who is a little too helpful and a little too intrusive for the couple’s preference. The place is lovely, the room is nice, however some sinister things occur around the seams. For example, the shower runs a little too hot—almost scalding the skin off Pete’s back and resulting in a shattered shower door and various cuts.
When a helicopter arrives carrying four passengers, the situation becomes even odder. Karl Liebnecht (Charles Gray) is a German industrialist specializing in weapons manufacture, Jacques Grandier (Lee Montague) is a hotelier who runs a massive empire in that particular industry, Barbara Kirstenburg (Hildegard Neil) is a world renowned fashion designer, and Maria Gabrieli (Marianne Broome) is a swimmer and influential public figure based in Rome. Latecomer Clive Jackson (Roger Daltrey) is in the music biz, running one of the biggest labels in the world. Each of these five owes their livelihood to Ravenhurst’s host, and each of them have come for some kind of unspecified rite.
As it turns out, the Jason Mountolive the couple met before is not to be seen. The only Jason Mountolive present is a dying old man kept quarantined inside a state of the art, oxygenated, and monitored room. He’s got a gift to bestow upon Margaret, and a legacy that will go to one of his five guests … or Margaret.
Soon enough, the sinister turns deadly, people start to die in unusual but possibly accidental ways. Margaret and Pete struggle to find a way out of the closing noose of horror. She is convinced there’s an occult answer, while he’s far more concerned with the human causes. Richard Marquand helms a brooding, slow burn potboiler horror story with The Legacy (1979).
Some movies I come to by reputation or a cool trailer piquing my interest. The Legacy is a film I came to well after reading the novelization from John Coyne back in junior high school. To be honest, the book wasn’t all that good, and the screenplay it was based off of was probably to blame—then again, Coyne’s novels have never been personal favorites since the first of his books I encountered (Hobgoblin) had a lot of promise until it bought into that Mazes and Monsters bullshit interpretation of the “dangers” of roleplaying games. More on him in another article, however. His novelization of the script from Jimmy Sangster, Patrick Tilley, and Paul Wheeler resulted in a breezy book, lean and mean. So, I figured the film might be a fun thing to watch. In general, it is.
The story melds the mysterious old house along with an occult theme that was popular at the time. In some ways, this movie is the more sedate and sane flipside to Norman J. Warren’s delightfully bonkers Satan’s Slave (1976). And I can’t help but feel that the seriousness it takes with its material is ultimately to its detriment. At its heart, the film wants to be as stylish and engrossing as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), thrusting its likeable American couple into a paranoid situation and building up a cult. Alas, it was not to be.
Sam Elliott delivers a good performance as the likeable wild card, the man who showed up where and when no one expected him to. Katharine Ross is also good as the woman in danger who has a legacy she knows nothing about and slowly learns.
The most interesting people to watch are Jason and the guests, a batch of sleazy Eurohorror characters played to the nines by Standing, Hogg, Gray, Montague, Neil, and Broome. And Tyzack turns in a perfectly eerie performance as a nurse who might also be a demonic familiar or homunculus.
Unfortunately, the color palette for the film is not the brightest. The whole piece is drear, grays and somber tones to emphasize a kind of permanent edge of winter. Cinematographers Dick Bush and Alan Hume make fair choices for lighting and photography. I tend to prefer my films a bit brighter than this, but the look certainly emphasizes the shadowy conspiracy angles and the dire atmosphere.
One of the oddest choices for the film is its musical score, which is oddly peppy for much of the running time. This has to be the perkiest old dark house movie I’ve seen, due in full part to the music composed by Michael J. Lewis. There’s also a pop song from Kiki Dee playing during the credits that adds little to the atmosphere of the film.
Just a few years on, Richard Marquand would go on to great fame and fortune directing Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) as well as mainstream fare like Eye of the Needle (1981) and Jagged Edge (1985). Horror does not seem to be his forte, because the film is not really all that scary now a days (if it was at the time). There are lingering shots on Margaret and Pete’s efforts to escape the terror that threatens to engulf them. However, these scenes—one on horseback, one in a car—always cycle back around to deliver the characters back at Ravenhurst. While it’s good to see the characters trying to escape their fate, we spend a little too much time spinning wheels instead of pushing the story forward.
The mystic murder sequences are not terribly horrifying. The first of these, involving an invisible wall holding a swimmer under the surface, has the potential to be nightmarish, but that feeling never quite gels. There’s an exploding mirror gag which peppers one character with deadly shards of glass that would be done better in Italian horror. The gore is often subdued, which is a perfectly acceptable choice, but the emotional connections for the victims are never quite strong enough to elicit sympathy. One exception is when Pete and the last of the guests are caught in a cat and mouse game of hunter and prey, one man armed with a rifle and the other toting a crossbow. There’s a fair amount of suspense there because Sam Elliott is a solid actor who makes both the moment and threat feel real.
One gets the sense that the picture is striving for the kind of revelation that powered Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1974). While The Legacy is a similar slow burn chiller, it never really finds that level of “holy crap!” release.
The Shout! Factory edition comes with a minor amount of features, including an interview with effects artist Robin Grantham, the trailer, TV spot, and still gallery. The real draw here is the high-definition transfer, which makes the movie look downright pristine, far, far better than any of the VHS copies I saw back in the day.
The Legacy is a curious artifact of a film. It builds up a sense of dread and suspense, and the chemistry between Elliott and Ross is strong (they would go on to get married after the production), but it’s a slow build and slower burn flick with a few sly and subtle payoffs. Folks looking for explosions of horror and carnage will be mostly disappointed save for a scene or two. The film is a quiet piece, playing on the occult and Satanic dreads of the period. These days it feels almost quaint.
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The Legacy is available in DVD and Blu-ray editions.
Writing for “We Are All Beholden to Jason: The Legacy (1979)” is copyright © 2023 by Daniel R. Robichaud.
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