Said family seems to squabble with each other over romantic interests, financial problems and anything else you can think of.
One of them, a Miss Clifford as played by Mona Goya wants to inherits the entire family estate.
But in order to do this she'll have to remove her (soon to be late) husband.
However a complication arises as she discovers her son-in-law is now the legal heir to the estate and holds with him all financial opportunity that she was looking to acquire.
So she needs to eliminate a different person.
There's also a series of love affairs happening within the family that the film ultimately doesn't want to bother with.
It introduces all these different people associating with one another, some of which at a very lovely French casino. But then the movie gives up on that plot. It's annoying given that the film is only an hour long and we barely get any character interaction with the people that matter.
We also have a tertiary story involving Boris karloff's character. A kind of reclusive Doctor who's doing some form of medical study.
It's never said what it is he's experimenting on. But the funding for said experiment has dried up. So now in a form of desperation he takes a job from Miss Clifford in order to assassinate her husband to acquire money to pay him off for his new works.
As mentioned above there's a complication involving the son and now he needs to kill him. It should also be made clear that Miss Clifford and the son-in-law or around the same age.
Mona Goya is playing her character to such an extreme exaggeration that it's impossible to take anything she does seriously. I'd say she was chewing the scenery but really she's just yelling at everything.
Finally there's the nurse. She's working for Boris Karloff's character as a caretaker and is told to acquire this strange syringe that he needs for Mrs.Clifford husband. Somehow she ends up misplacing the syringe.
Later on when she finds it, she decides not give it to the doctor. As she's ever suspicious of his activities.
Karloff is really adequate to find the syringe even long after the husband has died.
So she sends it off to a medical examination where it's revealed to contains a high amount of deadly poison.
However this information is unfortunately reported to Boris Karloff who then kidnaps the nurse and has her held captive in a house somewhere.
Why he didn't just have her killed and dumped her body out in the middle of nowhere is beyond me.
She's able to escape from the place and make it back to the manoir just in time to reveal that the medicine he was supposed to be giving to the son-in-law (because of a suspicious cut on his arm that was making him sick) is actually another form of poison.
The doctor not wanting to be captured by the authorities takes the boys indirectly and dies.
Honestly I am really baffled as to what this film is trying to do.
It wanted to do this whole murder mystery plot revolving around a suspicious doctor and a mother-in-law character looking to her family inheritance.
But it has so little time to develop anything that you just don't get invested in any of the characters or their motivations.
And they wasted a whole whack of time on other people to begin with.
I suspected somebody might have had the first draft of an idea for a story they may have wanted to make. However instead of developing anything, they just through what they could find onto a screen and hope to God that it worked out.
Luckily the last 20 minutes of the movie become gradually more entertaining but it's still not enough to save this minimalistic lackluster film.
There's nothing particularly wrong with it from a pacing point of view or even the story. There's just not enough of it to get involved in.
It would have done better as a one-off television episode.
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