Legacy (2008)

Is it fair to criticize a movie so scrappy, it's an accomplishment that it attains feature-length status at all? Sometimes a movie can't help betraying its low-budget roots, but every once in a while a movie shows up to the party already wasted just to cuss everybody out. It's just so awkward and nasty, you can't help but wonder how many inches away it is from doing porn.

Haylie Duff stars in this movie that looks and sounds just like porn without the sex. Well, most of the sex. There's a really disturbing scene where Haylie and her stoner boyfriend have sex, and the stoner guy videotapes it to show all his friends. Upon seeing it, the other guys cheer and applaud even though this footage is just the guy, shoulders up, pumping away. What you take from this is up to you. You can bet it was unintentional.

Which is so weird, because the tone this movie strikes requires such a careful modulation of details like that. It's supposed to be a nasty, "Jawbreaker"-esque murder satire with just enough taboo sexy meanness from hot young girls to make every frame just so, incredibly, delicious. And yet... hard.. Like... a Jawbreaker. You see, Haylie Duff runs the strictest bubblegum sorority to ever occupy a porn set in the San Fernando Valley, and she's not about to let a fat pledge ruin it even if she's the daughter of a former sorority mom. Mom will flex her money to make sure her fat daughter stays, and surprise surprise, the first party they throw sees the fat girl dead from a mysterious beating. Uh--oh! Cue the plinky strings on the soundtrack. Delicious.

First, this movie acts like it's a closely observed real-time dissection of What Went Wrong That Night. Then, it decides to do a Rashomon (link to "Basic" page) with all the girls stammering in separate interrogation rooms (allowing for all manner of delicious intercutting) while Haylie Duff vamps it up like a bad 40. Then, they go home and the killer chases them around with a knife. It's hard to say how it ends, but with such an explosive payoff to such an expert buildup, it would be a lie to say the whole diabolical confection wasn't completely... delicious.