The film opens in Los Angeles. Margaret Walsh (Katherine Ross) is talking on the phone, making sure a cheque for $50,000 from a British company called ‘Wigans and Trumble development’ has cleared. She discusses it with her boyfriend Pete Danner (Sam Elliott), it appears that the company has hired Margaret who is an architect but hasn’t told her exactly what for. Margaret has been told to travel to England and asks Pete to go with her, to which he agrees. After one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard during the opening credits, ‘Another Side of Me’ by Kiki Dee, Pete and Margaret are involved in an accident on a stretch of road in the middle of the English countryside with a Rolls-Royce because Pete was riding his motorbike on the wrong side. The both end up lying by the side of the road, their bike is badly damaged but they both walk away unharmed. The Rolls-Royce belongs to Jason Mountolive (John Standing) who along with his chauffeur Harry (Ian Hogg) makes sure Pete and Margaret are OK and sorts out a mechanic to repair Pete’s motorbike. Jason also asks’s Pete and Margaret to his house for tea. They feel they have little else to do and accept Jason’s invitation. Jason’s house turns out to be a majestic large country house. He invites them in and are greeted by a Nurse Adams (Margaret Tyzack) who strangely seems to be expecting them. More people arrive, Jacques Grandier (Lee Montague), Karl Liebnecht (Charles Gray, better known as Blofeld from Diamonds are Forever (1971)), Clive Jackson (Roger Daltrey, yes the lead singer from ‘The Who’), Barbara Kirstenburg (Hildegarde Neil) and Maria Gabrieli (Marianne Broome). Each guest wears a ring, the same ring that Margaret wears and cannot seem to remove however hard she tries. Both Pete and Margaret become suspicious and start to think that something strange might be going on. After one of the guests mysteriously dies and other odd occurrences happen Pete and Margaret decide they should leave. All their attempts to do so end in failure and accept that they aren’t going anywhere for the time being. Pete and Margaret’s happiness is shattered as some sort of evil force begins to influence and control Margaret’s life. More guests start to die in mysterious ‘accidents’ and Margaret starts to discover that her presence there is no coincidence. Margaret begins to search for the truth about why she is really there and who the now bed-ridden and incredibly ill Jason Mountolive actually is and what he wants. Eventually she finds the answers to the source of the evil power within the house and discovers her own ‘Legacy’! Directed by Richard Marquand I actually really rather liked this haunted house horror film. Most people will probably be put off by the slow paced script by Jimmy Sangster, Patrick Tilley and Paul Wheeler which to be fair could have been a little tighter and less ponderous. But for me it didn’t have long boring stretches of irrelevant dialogue or character development that nobody wants or needs, the majority of the script is relevant to the story and in a film like this we need to care at least on a basic level about the people involved. The twists and turns are revealed gradually, although not completely to my satisfaction and a few things could have been elaborated on a little bit more. The film managed to keep my interest throughout and I liked the overall story and where it went, even if the last couple of minutes didn’t make a whole lot of sense and felt somewhat rushed and unfinished. The English country side and Stately house looks gorgeous, and with two extremely experienced cinematographers listed, Dick Bush and Alan Hume it should do. The production design by Disley Jones is top-notch too. We get shots of blood dripping down from an elaborately decorated ceiling into a wineglass, a point-of-view shot from inside a shower head, some nice underwater photography and generally speaking the film has a nice clean, crisp and impressive visual quality about it, much better than I was expecting anyway as is the whole film. There’s not much in the way of blood or gore, a burnt corpse, an on-the-spot tracheostomy using a kitchen knife and someone is impaled in flying shards of glass from a broken mirror. The acting is OK, except Roger Daltrey who is simply awful and embarrassingly overacts for his death scene. It has faults to be sure and it isn’t a masterpiece by any means, but for what it was I really liked it. Much more than I thought I would, worth watching but some may find it a little slow and somewhat silly.