The Beast Must Die (1972)
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. (Come on! It was once in the eighties and he was really drunk!)
Here's a thought about those people. Maybe they just killed these people because they were regular old serial killers. Or maybe they didn't do it at all. Maybe that one dude ate human flesh because he was a cannibal. Why in the world would you ever think a guy was a werewolf because he enjoyed chewing on people's arms? If I knew that about a person, I would probably jump to a hundred different conclusions, but not one of them was that he was a werewolf.
Anyway, once he drops the bomb on these people about the purpose of their party, they think he's kind of a dope, but no one puts up that much of a fuss about his plan to hunt one of them down. Now, later at dinner 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 that 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? Tom and he spend a good deal of time watching the guests mingle and talk, trying to find someone that will say something like, "gosh, I sure hope Tom doesn't figure out that I'm the werewolf." All they ever talk about though is what a putz Tom is for ruining their dinner.
The candlestick trick doesn't work because there isn't any wolfsbane in the air. Everyone knows that for a werewolf to be affected by silver, wolfsbane must be in the air along with the whole moon thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they just make up the whole idea of wolfsbane's relationship to werewolves in Universal's The Wolf Man? What kind of lazy-ass affair is this when all the legends and lore you're using are just ripped off of another movie that was made thirty or so years before? I guess Tom Newcliffe is hoping that the werewolf he catches will by the very whiney Larry Talbot. Which one of you guests is really Larry Talbot? Is it one of you chicks in drag or something?
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. The first time he does this, he is assisted by his Polish buddy back in the control room through a radio. He tells Tom where the werewolf is, giving him updates on its location as it gets closer and closer like Tom was off fighting an alien or a predator or something instead of the moderately sized dog that he's really battling.
At first 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. Wow, that's great. It's a movie about a guy who spends his weekend trying to hunt a dog, only to be outsmarted by said dog.
Because this dog is so cunning, he's able to escape Tom and heads right for the Polish guy's command center. Never mind how this dog knew where it was. I'm reasonably certain that Tom never revealed there was a command center to his guests (after all, he thought one of them was a werewolf) and how did Tom know that's where the dog was going? He tries to warn the Polish guy, but this is a guy that came from a country whose hockey team drowned in spring training, so he stays put and the dog rips his eye out and bites holes in all the television monitors. Big dog:1 Rich idiot:0.
The next day one of the guests wants to leave so Tom goes out and tears some important nut or bolt out of everyone's car and chucks them into the pond on the estate, but tells everyone once he bags himself a werewolf, he'll call Carquest and fix everyone's Torino for free. Also as an added bonus, the phones don't work. Tom recognizes that these developments may put a damper on the whole party vibe, so he busts out the old candlestick gag again. As you might imagine, most of the guests are thinking that holding a candlestick to see who turns all hairy is just so "yesterday's dinner" and they bitch and moan, especially Tom's wife.
She's really not the supportive type. She's always running around, glaring at Tom whenever he launches into his "one of you is a werewolf" or "the beast must die tonight!" speeches. She says stuff like, "I don't even know who you are anymore" which all of us know is woman-code for "tonight, this booty ain't on duty!"
There's a couple of more showdowns with that dastardly big dog. One in a barn where the dog attacks Tom's golden retriever and they have this dog fight that leaves Tom's doggy mortally wounded. After the werewolf attacks Tom's helicopter pilot (don't ask - he's rich) and Tom shoots at it and manages to blow up the helicopter (tax write-off) he goes back in and pulls the Old Yeller routine on his dog. I kept hoping he would turn the gun on me by this time, but instead 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. Don't even bother. There aren't really any clues and the solution doesn't make any sense except that it could have been anyone else in the group without changing anything in the movie, except to switch who got killed. There's some false alarms and people are revealed to be werewolves that aren't the real werewolf. I would tell you who the werewolf was so you wouldn't be tempted to waste your money on this one, but I don't even remember the guy's name.
That's a major problem with this film, the 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 that studies werewolves and has little to do but stand around and occasionally explain why the candlestick trick didn't work. Why would Tom invite him out to the house? Did he think Peter was a werewolf? I still don't get how he thought any of the people were a werewolf. I bet if I invited six people to my trailer for a weekend, I wouldn't get no werewolves. Deadbeat dads, wife beaters, alcoholics, pedophiles, Kansas City Royals fans - yes, but werewolves - I don't think so.
Add all that to the fact 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 - and you end up with 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?