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Family Plot (1976)

Wise Rating  68%
Review Date: 2016

Mildly amusing Hitchcock suspense flick, with not much suspense except at a few key points of the movie. Then again, it is Hitchcock. And it’s his last film to boot. The Hitchcock genius doesn’t really shine all that much; it feels more like a made-for-TV movie a lot of the time. But it has his indelible dark humor throughout the film, whose plot is essentially “con artists vs. killers.” “Good” is rather relative here as the “good guys,” a taxi driver and his fake medium wife, appear to be the bad guys until the cold-blooded killers show up. Watching the movie, I get the feeling that at this point in his life, Hitchcock didn’t care about making a great movie or even a good one; he just wanted to have some fun. And fun the movie is, albeit slow-paced most of the time. But all of Hitchcock’s movies, even the stinkers (relative to other Hitchcock movies) have at least one great sequence, and this movie is no exception. The “great scene” here occurs on a drive down California’s Highway US 1; I won’t spoil it for you, but the scene is priceless.