I've just been reading the previous comments and what emerges is 1) these people are easily pleased and 2) not only have they not read the novel which was the jumping-off point but they are clearly unfamiliar with Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series of 'police procedurals' in which the 87th itself is the hero rather than any one individual cop. There is a regular team of well-drawn detectives, uniformed cops, medical examiners etc and the novels are clearly set in New York albeit a New York city with five fictitious boroughs clearly corresponding to Brooklyn, Queens, Richmond, Manhattan and The Bronx. Here Chabrol has taken perhaps the best known detective, Steve Carella and teamed him with a Bert Klinger, who is dark haired and in his thirties whereas McBain wrote a character named Bert KLING who was a blonde blue-eyed WASP (the precinct comprised all the ethnic mixes that would be found in a Manhattan precinct house). This is bizarre to say the least; if Chabrol was, as seems very possible, interested in the incest factor - which in the novel was merely the solution to a killing - all he had to do was develop his own plot around that theme but by crediting McBain, keeping McBain's title and ONE of McBain's regular cops he winds up with a hybrid that pleases no one. This is one of those movies when the audience gets the feeling that Donald Sutherland, Donald Pleasance and David Hemmings are acting in three different films and none of them is all that good. See it as a curio.
Review of Blood Relatives
