This movie’s story can be categorized as “rich people who have more time and money on their hands than brains.” Only a person who wipes his arse with twenty dollar bills could come up with a scheme as silly as the one put forth in The Beast Must Die and only a person with too much disposal income could afford to fund such a plot.
A really rich British bloke with a fancy estate in the country uses his spare time to do stuff like test out his security system. How does he do this? He hires a bunch of gun-toting goons to hunt him down while they use hidden cameras and microphones to track his every movement. The best part about this is that this isn’t even the rich guy’s main scheme the movie is concerned with. You see, he really wants to have a werewolf hunt on his property!
Though I’ve never been to Britain, I do recall a few movies about werewolves in London (as well as a hit pop song), however I didn’t realize that they were so plentiful that you could organize a weekend around hunting one. But that’s just what Tom Newcliffe does!
As soon as he’s done getting caught over and over again by his hired henchmen (this reminds me a bit of Inspector Clouseau who had his manservant constantly try to kill him to keep him on his toes), Newcliffe returns to his guests who no doubt were wondering first, why their host disappeared, and second why he reappeared in his own front yard with a bunch of guys apparently shooting him in the back.
He explains to his guests that he was just running some tests and that the real reason they’re all there is because he thinks one of them is werewolf! He just doesn’t know which one of them it is. So he’s set up all this security on his place and is going to use it to help him hunt the werewolf down.
It’s an interesting concept and the movie gets a little bit of credit for trying something off the beaten path. Unfortunately, as is usually the case when you go off the beaten path, you end up squatting in poison ivy.
Newcliffe’s scheme didn’t make much sense to me. First of all he assembled all these people (six to be exact – this is a pretty low budget affair) and the only thing they seemed to have in common is that they all have some type of shady past which makes them a prime suspect for being a werewolf.
What are the tip-offs in these people’s lives that would lead someone smart enough to get that rich to think they might just be a werewolf? It seemed to be one of two things: either these people were suspected of some unsolved murders or in the case of one guy, there was some cannibalism in his past.
No one puts up that much of a fuss about his plan to hunt one of them down. Later at dinner though when he starts babbling about how the werewolf craves human flesh and then demands that everyone touch a silver candlestick, they all get outraged at him, but that seemed to be more because he was spoiling a good dinner, not because they were concerned that he might kill one of them.
Tom also has a buddy back in the control room who watches all the stuff that is going on through his closed circuit TVs and microphones. He tells Tom that he thinks his werewolf hunt is just a wild goose chase and that he left his own country (Poland) to escape such superstitious belief. Yeah, that’s a real good reason to leave. How about leaving just because it’s Poland?
Periodically throughout the rest of the movie, Tom gets it in his fool head that the werewolf is on the loose somewhere on the grounds and he goes charging out with his rifle in the middle of the night trying to track it down.
Once I saw Tom fighting a moderately sized dog, I thought the movie was trying to swerve me with their shaggy dog routine. I mean, this wasn’t really the werewolf, right?
It was just a big hairy dog that was on the loose for some cheap scares and stuff. The real werewolf was probably hiding in the bushes, all half-man, half-dog and pure terror just waiting to pounce and rip people apart.
But then this big dog kept reappearing running and jumping over people and peeing on security cameras, and I reluctantly became convinced that this is all we were going to get from a monster standpoint in this movie.
Following a series of attacks by this large mutt, we finally get to the point that the beginning of the film had promised would eventually come: The Werewolf Break!
What exactly is the Werewolf Break? It’s a gimmick where the movie stops and a timer counts down thirty seconds so that we can guess who the werewolf is.
There’s a couple major problem with this film. One is the he utter lack of depth to any of the suspects. Tom sums up their questionable pasts at the beginning of the film and that’s all you get on these saps. You don’t care who the werewolf is, you don’t care who survives, and you just hope that Peter Cushing isn’t going to get too embarrassed in this thing.
Peter Cushing is in this? Technically, but all he does is play a doctor who studies werewolves and has little to do but stand around and occasionally explain why the candlestick trick didn’t work.
The movie’s real failing though is that the mystery isn’t any kind of mystery that can be solved by anyone. There aren’t any hints or facts that you can follow and piece together to come up with an educated guess.
With characters you barely know, let alone care about and a nonexistent mystery, what you are left is a movie that comes across as fairly bland and pointless. It’s not so awful that you’ll squirm like you have pinworms when you sit through it, but unless you have a Cushing fetish why bother even trying?
© 2011 MonsterHunter
