The Beast Must Die (1974)

Self-made millionaire and all-around prick Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) fancies himself the ultimate hunter. Ultimate hunters need the ultimate prey, and Tom has decided the most dangerous game isn’t humans like other rich movie pricks believe. Nope, it’s werewolves.

Consequently, he has invited a handful of people of dubious character – as well as sometimes potentially suggestive hairiness – onto his isolated island home – there’s a pianist and potential full moon based serial killer (Charles Gray), a potential murderess (Ciaran Madden) who is also friend of Tom’s girlfriend Caroline (Marlene Clark), and a hairy one-time cannibal (Tom Chadbon). Also invited is werewolf expert and enthusiast Dr Lundgren (Peter Cushing), typically dressed nattily in black with red applications, come to spout some very peculiar werewolf lore and be Peter Cushing with a dubious Swedish accent.

Tom, being a modern kind of rich asshole, has wired most of the island and the mansion (apart from the bathrooms, which will become a problem) with cameras and microphones, secretly controlled by his very own Man in a Chair (Anton Diffring).

Now Tom only needs to keep his guests on the island and wait for the full moon. However, it does turn out that this werewolf would really rather play And Then There Were None instead of The Most Dangerous Game, and Tom may or may not be a great hunter, but he certainly isn’t even a minor detective.

Because sometimes the gods provide us wonderful gifts, Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die isn’t just a werewolf murder mystery, but a werewolf murder mystery with a gimmick right out of the William Castle playbook. You see, before the climax, the film stops for a “Werewolf Break”™, during which we, the audience, are meant to come up with the identity of the werewolf – with headshots of the surviving suspects for the very weak of memory. Of course, this isn’t actually much of a fair play kind of mystery, so the whole thing is only ever a gimmick.

Ignoring the gimmick (though who’d want to do such a thing?), The Beast is good, straightforward 70s style fun, with a bunch of highly unsympathetic characters – the nominal hero of the piece being the worst of them even though he isn’t a murderous werewolf - getting on each others’ nerves or murdered, respectively, broken up with Tom’s incompetent attempts at bagging himself the werewolf.

That werewolf is a bit if a problem, alas, because for some reason, the production doesn’t involve werewolf make-up, as was tradition in the werewolf game at that point, but rather goes for putting a shaggy full-body hairpiece on an actual dog – with exactly the disappointing results one expects from that approach. Annett’s direction doesn’t suggest he realizes that this kind of werewolf is best kept out of frame and in the dark and provides us with many a good look at it.

But then, the direction doesn’t exactly suggest much thought having been put into anything – it’s a very straightforward point and shoot affair that does include some of the fashions of its time not because of any interest in style but because everybody was doing them.

Yet still, this neutral directorial effort can’t drag the fun out of the thing, at least not too badly: too irresistible is the idea of the werewolf murder mystery, too wonderfully of its time and place are its ideas, and too great is the lure of the Werewolf Break™. We all should have one.