Question: is The Legacy supposed to be a horror movie? Though it bills itself as one, it's about as frightening as a six-foot teddy bear holding a giant swirl lollipop. So low-key is its approach and so anticlimactic are its climaxes that you wait for it to get going until you realize it already got there (and "there" is nothing like it looked in the brochure). Trading on the decadent gentry of Hammer in part by enlisting a couple of personnel from the defunct studio, The Legacy lacks the stylistic verve to make its borrowings stick--the camera merely presents the action with as little fuss as possible, an inexcusable crime for a genre that lives or dies on atmosphere. So lacking in affect is this film that the only passion it arouses is around a peripheral injustice: director Richard Marquand's connection to Return of the Jedi has kept his name alive when it should have long ago passed into obscurity.

Our heroine is Margaret Walsh (Katharine Ross), an American who receives a rich job offer from a mysterious organization located across the pond. Despite his misgivings, rumpled paramour Pete Danner (Sam Elliott) tags along with her to England, where the couple crashes their motorcycle on a backcountry road almost immediately upon arrival. Little do Margaret and Pete know when they find themselves staying the night in the mansion of some apparently hospitable locals that they'll be not just prevented from leaving their temporary lodgings, but also forced to compete against a gaggle of visiting industrialists for the titular "legacy" of a demonic codger on life support. Turns out that poor Margaret is caught up in--wait for it--"black magic," and now that she's there she must endure a "Ten Little Indians" scenario in which the old man's flunkies prove expendable one-by-one.

Not a paragon of originality, perhaps, but Hammer was never really about the thing itself: it was about the resonance of evil, not the fact of it. Too, the idea of plopping a pair of literal-minded Yanks in the midst of British decay is irresistable, though you'd need a cleverer creative team than The Legacy's to suss out the cultural differences. Although co-screenwriter Jimmy Sangster is a Hammer veteran, The Legacy fails to establish mood on even the most perfunctory level. Marquand's major contribution is to render commonplace any and all potential menace, suggesting a desire to comfort the audience with the fact that nobody really dies--he practically leaves in the tails of shots where the actors get up and wander towards craft services. From a fiery death for Charles Gray (another Hammer vet) to the "sinister" hospital room that houses the Satanic benefactor, Marquand manages to bungle every single gimme the script hands him.

That he also miscasts The Legacy goes without saying. Whatever their relative merits, Ross and Elliott appear lost among the (admittedly feeble) Britishness--not as characters, but as actors, since they haven't been given a take on the unfolding action. (Elliott himself seems particularly confused, as if he's wondering why he isn't doing his usual hayseed character bit. Most of the time he flails around like he's being attacked by a swarm of bees.) And don't get me started on the hugely inappropriate score from Michael J. Lewis, which initially pours on syrupy strings that obliterate the idea that one should foreshadow the evil to come. Everything is so arbitrarily and lackadaisically treated that nothing has any impact--you sit there stunned, waiting either for something to happen (in vain, as it turns out) or to drift off into blissful slumber. That it induces the latter state is its sole distinction: as a horror movie, The Legacy is a wash, but as an anaesthetic it more than does the trick.

Universal debuts The Legacy on DVD in a 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer. The image is a little pallid, with flesh tones looking especially washed-out, though fine detail is sharp enough to compensate. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound is similarly adequate: expect fullness but not fireworks. A trailer for the film rounds out the disc.-Travis Hoover