Sometimes hitting the multiplex just isn’t in the cards. That’s when cable, the web and streaming step in to provide an instant movie fix. But how to separate the wheat from the chaff? I’m happy to help; every week I’ll pick a flick and see if it’s worth your time. This week it’s “The Inheritance”.

The Story: Oh look, it’s a family reunion.  The young twenty/thirty-somethings of the families all meet up at a huge house in the middle of nowhere.  What to do?  The cousins drink a little drink, smoke a little smoke, and meet their whacked-out “elders” who make booze & weed look like little kid stuff.  All thanks to Pazuzu Zuul Fred Chakabazz, a demon that is obviously pissed off because of that hideously stupid name.  So over the centuries the elders of these families have gotten together to decide who gets an “inheritance”.  Wanna know what the rest of the crew gets?  Well, it’s not a set of steak knives.

The Good: At the beginning of The Inheritance, I hoped this would be an interesting, rip-roaring ride with an African-American history backdrop, with an almost all African-American cast; a rarity in this genre.  The idea of how slaves came to their new world, and what they had to do to survive would make for a very interesting horror movie.  Get your scare on, learn a little something, and get to see the horror genre go in a direction that hasn’t been done to death.  Nice….

The Bad: But The Inheritance fails on all levels.  This film takes an interesting premise and uses it to crank out a horror movie that’s only scary when you think about the time you’ve wasted watching it.  There’s no real discussion as to how the families have fared since their humble beginnings, only that they “have money” now.  Their “chosen one” is so obvious from scene one that it kills any sense of suspense.  And the elders don’t look scary once it all goes down, they look silly.  By the way, how does the family survive when each generation needs to go through a weeding-out process that kills every member of that generation but one?  More importantly, how do I get back to the home menu on my Roku?

The Everything Else: The special effects are cheap and done with cutaway shots and haphazard editing.  And when the characters get bumped off one at a time it’s no great shame, since all we know about them is that they’re kinda related-ish.  The moral of the story is a tough one to decipher, since the story is so weakly drawn that it’s not worth following.  Maybe “be scared of wealthy old people”?

Here’s the breakdown:
Would I watch it again?: Not for love or money.  Well, maybe for money; that way I could pay for the therapy I’d need to get over re-watching this dreck.
Should you see it?: No.  Nup.  Nyet.  Try to track down The Legacy, the movie The Inheritance so obviously tried to rip off.  Or Tales from the Hood, a fun anthology of urban horror.  Or…just about anything else in your queue but this.
Netflix average rating: 2 ½ Stars
My rating: 1 Star (and that’s pushing it.)

(Originally posted to Atomic Popcorn 9/7/2011.  LINK TO THE ORIGINAL PIECE: Clicky!)