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Post by kooshmeister on Mar 25, 2013 16:36:56 GMT
Somewhere in rural England, a man is running, running for his very life. Everywhere he goes, his movements are tracked by hidden security cameras and a low-flying helicopter, which reports his movements to several armed men driving around in a Land Rover. Stopping, they get out and pursue the fugitive on foot. However, something's not quite right. Each time they catch the man, despite being armed with guns, they let him go. This proceeds for some until the man runs onto the grounds of a palatial mansion, where suddenly the armed men reappear and open fire... and it is then revealed that their guns are loaded with blanks. The man, Tom Newcliffe, is unharmed.
Cut to a control room inside the mansion, where a refreshed Tom, now revealed as the wealthy owner of the house and all the land around it, is talking to a Polish man named Pavel.
Pavel is an electronics expert and the head of the mansion's security. He has turned the isolated country estate into an impenetrable fortress patrolled by armed guards and helicopters, and overseen by uncountable security cameras and hidden microphones, both inside the house and in the woods outside. There is also an electronic perimeter, which, if crossed, will set off a alarm in the control room. Tom was testing the effectiveness of the system, using himself as bait, and he seems very satisfied.
Pavel, though, is slightly in the dark about why his friend wants all this added security. Tom isn't terribly forthcoming about his reasons. Tom, we learn, is a self-made millionaire and "born hunter" whose predatory instincts allowed him to claw his way out of the African slum he was born in and earn enough money to move to Miami, Florida, where he had all of his money and met and married his beloved wife, Caroline. He has hunted every kind of animal of every continent around the world, but now he has a new prey in mind. One which he also is confident he'll be doing a service to society in killing. He tells Pavel he'll learn what it is he intends to hunt soon.
Sometime later, Tom and Caroline are greeting some guests they've invited out to a weekend get-together. Or, should I say, Tom has invited them. Caroline is suspicious of her husband's motivations, mostly because she's never even heard of half of the people he's invited. But Tom seems to know each of them intimately, having done extensive research on each of them. One by one, he introduces them to Caroline (and us). He explains that each of them has one thing in common: death surrounds them.
First up is Arthur Bennington, a former United Nations diplomat. Apparently, he and two others of the diplomatic corps got into a scrape in Africa and the other two turned up dead, horribly mauled. Only Bennington survived. Bennington was exonerated... but fired from his job. He now works as a TV show host (!).
Then we have Jan Gilmore and his estranged wife Davina. Jan is a former concert pianist. Once renowned throughout the world, he is persona non grata in certain European countries because every time he was in town to perform, there were grisly murders. He has since stopped playing. Davina Gilmore, a wealthy, jetsetting socialite, has been separated from her husband following some kind of spat between them, but since Jan quit playing, she has come running back to him. According to Tom, though, every time she attends a party, they always come up a guest short.
Then there is Paul Foote. A former medical student turned artist, Paul and some friends, while in medical school, once, as a grim lark, ate some flesh from one of the cadavers, leading to their expulsion. Later, during his career as an artist, there was a brutal murder, and one of Paul's paintings just happened to resemble the victim, and he was arrested for the killing, but eventually released for lack of evidence. Paul claims he saw the victim's face in a newspaper photo, but Tom isn't so sure.
Lastly, we have Dr. Christopher Lundgren, who is a Swedish archaeologist by trade but whose personal hobby is cryptzoology. In particular - and here, we see why Tom saved him for last - Lundgren is a self-professed expert on werewolves.
This shocks the other guests (as well as Pavel, who is listening in from the control room), and Tom explains that he believes without a shadow of a doubt that one of them is a werewolf, and he aims to prove it and slay the monster. The full moon is coming up, he says, and will last for three days, and with all the added security around the house, there is no way the werewolf can escape, and he vows wait until the werewolf's identity is revealed, and then hunt and kill it, after which the remaining, non-lycanthropic guests may leave.
Tom's plan seems foolproof. The security system airtight. The guards well-trained. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans. Before the three days are over, the Newcliffe's guest list will be quite a bit shorter...
The Beast Must Die is a fine and fun little werewolf film, with some great performances by actors all too familiar to genre fans. We have Peter Cushing as wise and kindly Dr. Lundgren (doing a rather hokey Swedish accent he lapses in and out of), the smarmy, acid-tongued Charles Gray as Bennington, the painfully handsome and soft-spoken Anton Diffring as Pavel, and, years before his turn as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films, Michael Gambon as Jan Gilmore. There's also Ciaran Madden as Davina, although she's a bit on the wooden side; making up for this where the fairer sex are concerned is the positively gorgeous Marlene Clark as Tom's wife Caroline.
But the true standout performances are Calvin Lochart and Tom Chadbon.
Calvin Lockhart is probably best known to younger viewers as the voodoo-practicing drug lord King Willie in Predator 2. Here, as Tom Newcliffe, he lords himself over all of the other actors, even stalwarts like Charles Gray and Peter Cushing. Lockhart's delivery is a bit stilted at times, but, nevertheless, his sheer charisma and force of personality make give his Tom an utterly magnetic and engaging screen presence. He's like a modern day Captain Ahab, too, growing more and more crazed and obsessed at figuring out who the werewolf is each time he fails to kill it.
And then we have Tom Chadbon, who I knew best as Detective Duggan in the Doctor Who serial City of Death. I loved him in that, and he's an absolute joy here. His Paul Foote is quite simply the funniest and most engaging character in the entire film. Up until a certain point, he doesn't take anything seriously and is constantly making jokes, even in the most dire circumstances; clearly, Paul operates on an entirely different plain of mental existence from the other people in the mansion.
If the movie has one weakness, it's the werewolf itself. Apparently, Amicus blew its entire budget renting a helicopter and assembling all these wonderful actors, that they had zilch left over for the monster, so the titular beast is played by an actual wolf. Or, at least, a large, shaggy dog that looks reasonably enough like a wolf. Still, to Amicus' credit, they keep the critter mostly offscreen and let the suspense and the drama drive the story, and, when the shaggy abomination does rear its cute head and waggy tail, they shoot the attack scenes around the animal, and it works fairly well.
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