Horror Movie Horrors: The Inheritance

I stumbled across this movie when it was added to Netflix a little while ago. Seeing a few names I recognized (and the fact that I would enjoy just listening to Keith David read the phone book to me), I added it to the queue for a rainy day. Well, it's not quite rainy, but I do have a rare day off with nothing in particular to do, so I decided to check it out.

When the final credits rolled, I decided to check out some of the reviews for the movie (something I can't do when on my Xbox, which is how I access Netflix 90% of the time) and was kind of surprised. With every horror movie, you expect to see a lot of low ratings. Part of this is because horror movies tend to be crappy, but it can also be attributed to the fact that people can be incredibly picky about what they're looking for in a horror film. Some are looking for extreme gore and they don't care much about the plot, others look for compelling writing and performances, while still others are just looking to have the pants scared off of them. With a fairly broad scope of points to hit, it only makes sense that horror movies tend to get lower ratings.

Also, horror films tend to be shit.

But I was seeing review after review saying that this was the worst movie ever.

A short list of some horror movies that are worse than or equal to The Inheritance, limited by what I have personally viewed: 

Redneck Zombies
American Psycho 2: The All American Girl
Manos and the Hands of Fate
Gamebox 1.0 (which I've been meaning to write a review for)
Ticked Off Trannies with Knives (still trying to figure out how that got a high rating)
RoboGeisha (it's more of an action flick, but it has enough gore to be labelled horror)
Cabin Fever
Deadgirl
Transylmania
Satan's Little Helper
The Sitter
After.Life
Tooth and Nail
Any number of films featured on MST3K 

And that's not counting the number of films I've seen detailed reviews for that look 10 times worse. You want to call The Inheritance the worst movie of all time? Go watch some of the films reviewed by The Cinema Snob and then we can talk.

Now, I won't make any claims that I was watching this film with a serious critical eye. Today's movie choice was a film turned on as background noise while I spent some quality time beading.

Diet Coke helps the creative process.

But I will at least say that for a genre that is filled to the brim with stereotypical and formulaic slashers, this film was trying to do something a little different.

The story starts with a family reunion - five "cousins" from five close-knit families are called up to the old plantation where their ancestors were once enslaved for a get-together with their Elders. There was some confusion of people writing reviews thinking it was weird that two of these cousins were in a relationship, but they establish that these five are not actually related. Back in the days of slavery, there was a mysterious African shaman who was lynched but survived. He ensnared five slave families with promises of freedom, power, wealth and prosperity if they made sacrifices to him. Agreeing to do so, these families have stayed incredibly close to one another throughout the generations, considering themselves different branches of one spiritual family.

As far as these young people are concerned, it's just a weird family story. The real purpose of them meeting up with their Elders is so they can ask for some financial help.

In my opinion, the premise had promise. It kind of ties together the tropes commonly found in both witchcraft ritual horror and slasher films and it's interesting to see the concept of "evil ancient African magic" from the perspective of a film with an all-African-American cast (except for two out-of-place white people... guess who dies first?)

The performances were solid, but the script was really weak. The characters are put into an inescapable situation far too early in the film and don't make many intelligent attempts to save themselves, despite an obvious desire to. Toward the end, it seems that they wrote themselves into a corner: characters who know they have no chance of getting out of there simply jump into danger as if the writer didn't know how else to get rid of them. Because of this, the film doesn't really have an ending, which is it's biggest flaw.

Do I recommend this movie? Not really. It isn't great. Hell, it isn't even really good, but it fell into the following criteria:

1) I made it through to the end credits.
2) I didn't regret watching it.
3) I've seen a hell of a lot worse.

So, no. Sorry Netflixers. It's not the worst movie ever. It had the potential to be something much better, with a really strong cast, some good visual effects, and an interesting story idea. The script and storytelling was too weak to save it from being a 2.5 out of 5 in my book.