Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None and Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game meet werewolves with a sprinkling of Blaxploitation funk in Paul Annett’s thoroughly underwhelming The Beast Must Die, based on James Blish’s 1950 short story There Shall be No Darkness, first published in the pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. The film was made for Amicus and features a somewhat desperate William Castle-like gimmick, the “werewolf break”, a thirty second pause in the proceedings to allow the audience to guess the identity of the eponymous beast, an addition that Annett blames on producer Milton Subotsky. It’s a cheap trick and doesn’t work anyway as the film cheats and has two werewolves…
Millionaire businessman Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) has tracked and killed just about everything, but one last prey eludes him – a werewolf. To that end, he invites a group of people to his country estate and tells them that one of them is a lycanthrope, though he hasn’t yet decided if it’s his wife Caroline (Marlene Clark), disgraced diplomat Arthur Bennington (Charles Gray), married couple pianist Jan (Michael Gambon) and Davina Gilmore (Ciaran Madden), artist Paul Foote (Tom Chadbon) and archaeologist and a lycanthropy expert Professor Lundgren (Peter Cushing). Kept under surveillance in every part of the mansion and watched over by Pavel (Anton Diffring), the group start to suspect each other as the full moon approaches. As the wolf starts working its way through the party, paranoia runs riot and the audience is invited to take part in a “werewolf break” which parades the suspects before us and we are invited to guess who the werewolf is.
Calvin Lockhart certainly attacks his role with great enthusiasm, giving his nothing role rather more than it deserves. Whether his full throttle approach to the role works is down to personal taste – for every one of us who finds it over the top, there’ll be another who enjoys the scenery chewing. Newcliffe is a pretty poor kind of hunter – the only thing he actually manages to bag in the entire film is a helicopter and he shoots that by mistake. Marlene Clark turns up as Lockhart’s on-screen wife, fresh from turns in Night of the Cobra Woman (1972), Beware! The Blob (1972), Ganja & Hess (1973) and Enter the Dragon (1973), and the rest of the cast is fleshed out by a familiar cohort of genre regulars. The strangeness of Peter Cushing’s accent is matched only by the eccentricity of his hairpiece, Anton Diffring gets a rare sympathetic role in a genre film, and Michael Gambon, Charles Gray, Ciaran Madden and Michael Gambon are all there to make up the number of werewolf suspects.
As noted earlier, what should have been a twist (there are two werewolves!) feels like a bit of a cheat with the addition of the “werewolf break” – we’ve been told at the start, an onscreen caption being read out loud by the unmistakable tones of an uncredited Valentine Dyall that “this film is a detective story – in which you are the detective,” a naff enough idea as it is but when the twist ending reveals the presence of a second lycanthrope one can’t help feel a bit cheated. Matters aren’t helped much when the identity of the second werewolf is laughably easy to guess given that hardly anyone is left standing by that point. To make matters worse, it showed for a while in the States under an alternate title (look it up) that gives away the identity of the first wolf (it also did away with the “werewolf break”).
Cinematographer Jack Hildyard brings a bit of class to the proceedings and Douglas Gamley’s funky score has its fans though it all too often sounds like a collection of discarded cues from 70s television cop show. Annett’s direction is, at best, merely functional, shunting us from one scene to the next with little flair or panache. It was his only feature film, the rest of his career being confined to British television, including episodes of Poldark (1975-1977), Grange Hill (1978-2008) and Secret Army (1977-1979) as well as soap operas Emmerdale (1972-), Brookside (1982-2003) and EastEnders (1985-) where his anonymous (lack of) style was probably more at home.
There’s a lot of driving around in Land Rovers and Mercedes, plenty of Lockhart running around looking stressed and people sitting around exchanging suspicious glances and Props-spotters might recognise the distinctive desk microphones from Gerry Anderson’s UFO (1970-1973) that turn up in the control room. And that’s about as interesting as it gets sadly. Though the fact that the film’s werewolf is so unconvincing (it’s essentially a lightly made-up German Shepherd) that the American poster had to use the not-all-that-great lycanthrope from The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973) is rather amusing.
The Beast Must Die is much admired in some quarters but it’s hard to see why. It’s sluggish, predictable and entirely unconvincing, featuring arguable the worst werewolf ever seen on screen. It was Amicus’ last feature film before they embarked on a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations, The Land That Time Forgot (1975), At the Earth’s Core (1976) and The People That Time Forgot (1977), the last not bearing their name as the company had folded before the film could be released. It was a sad end for the company’s horror line which stretched back to their first anthology film Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) (The City of the Dead (1960) was made by producers Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg before they set up Amicus).
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