Blood Clan

Inspired by the historical evidence concerning the Bane Clan, a 19th-century family of Scottish cannibals, Blood Clan is a gothic thriller which never quite transcends its B-movie trappings. A Canadian production, the film stars Gordon Pinsent (John and the Missus, Silence of the North) as Judge William McKay, the man who orders the execution of the Bane's at film's opening in 1895, but refuses to hang a young child named Katy. Emigrating to Canada, McKay and his dour wife Margaret (Anne Mansfield) eke out a decent existence in a backwoods town with their natural daughter Mary and the adopted Katy. When a series of grisly murders (involving the removal of the victim's hearts) rocks the sleepy village, the now 19-year-old Katy Bane (Michelle Little) comes under suspicion. Hewing closely to the thriller conventions, the film routinely shifts the guilty finger from one ludicrous suspect to the next--an oversexed farmhand, the uppity Mary, the ridiculously evil Margaret, etc., before pulling the murderer out of a hat from nowhere (the clue comes in one of Katy's flashback dreams about fifteen minutes before the end of the movie). Winner of a Best Film award from the Alberta Motion Picture Industries in 1990 (must have been slim pickens), Blood Clan is a perfectly average achievement and nothing more. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Pitman)