The Beast Must Die, 1974.

I write this after having just finished all those shitty nazisploitation films so I have to begin this with saying that it is a breath of fresh air – where’s that meme of Chef Gordon Ramsay saying “finally some good fucking food?” The film stars Marlene Clark from the Switchblade Sisters, Blofeld from Diamonds are Forever, Sir Michael Gambon who I only know because of Top Gear (god look at how young Mr Clarkson looks!), and of course, Peter Cushing. The film opens rather shittily but wonderfully. We get a guitar with whakka-whakka funk sounds going on along with a narrator explaining to use that the movie will pause at some point so we can guess which character the werewolf is. I wish instead of just a narrator we got a creepy old crypt-keeper type to properly introduce the film. Like the old lady in At Midnight I’ll Take Your Corpse. The film is based off of a short story by the guy who invented the term gas giant to refer to planets like Jupiter.

The plot is a sort of weird version of the Most Dangerous Game mixed with a Poirot story. A bunch of folk are brought to an island by a millionaire who informs everyone that one of them is a werewolf and must be hunted. My guess is that the guy with the moustache is the werewolf only because I think the make-up process to create the werewolf effect would be easiest on him. The doctor-cannibal seems too obvious. Mr Cushing arrives to the party in a rather spiffy blue suit with checkered shirt. He looks like everyone’s grandpa. They all hang out in the mansion and are under constant surveillance to figure out who’s the target. If I am allowed to change my guess, I would like to accuse the butler, a character I was not previously aware of because he wears gloves during the dinner scene, meaning he never touches silverware.

As a mystery, it works well enough. The characters are largely compelling and each have enough motive to be the bad guy but also just enough alibi to keep us guessing. Mr Cushing has some sort of weird accent in this which I’m not a fan of but whatever. There’s some fun little tests and tricks that one would expect involving silver and wolfsbane and moons and whatnot that help to give us all the clues and red herrings we need to keep us guessing. They were wise in portraying the werewolf as fully a wolf creature instead of the traditional man-wolf hybrid as it means there’s no scraps of clothing or anything we can use to identify the creature. The werewolf is finally identified in a rather unorthodox way which I won’t spoil and features Mr Cushing slapping some sense into a hysteric dame. I wish this scene had more tension but this is remedied by only being a false ending! The real werewolf is REDACTED. Go to the end of this post to see if my guess was right.

There’s some excellent use of a 70s Land Rover but it’s not a van so we’re not going to talk about it anymore. There’s Blood and Beasts, no Breasts. I’m not going to say that this film was incredible but I enjoyed it enough. It was an interesting take on the normal set-up of a collection of people show up to an isolated location and one of them is a bad dude. I think my greatest complaint is that I don’t have a lot to say about it. It was slow at times which is reasonable in a mystery but I wish the highs packed a bit more punch. It would have been nice for it to play out more like a slasher film with more bodies turning up to help increase the tension. A transformation sequence also would have been nice but it would have screwed up the whole mystery bit. The characterization of the host is pretty good – you see how his obsession grows and drives him to madness over the course of the film. I kind of liked the werewolf break. It was a cheesy gimmick but it’d be fun if you’re sitting around watching this with a group of friends. All said and done, it’s probably worth a One Thumb Up Seal of Approval.

SPOILERS BELOW

I was right the first time. It was the guy with the moustache. I also like that the hunter that put all this on has his own werewolf scare. Very good ending as it means Mr Cushing is left with some cute euro chick.