The Beast Must Die (1974)

One of these eight people will turn into a werewolf. Can you guess who it is when we stop the film for the WEREWOLF BREAK? See it ... solve it ... but don't tell!

The Beast Must Die

I shit the bed.  When the "werewolf break" came I couldn't correctly guess who the werewolf was.  Well, I shouldn't be too hard on myself because I was partly right, but still, I failed.  I hang my head in shame.

So The Beast Must Die is sort of like a murder mystery but instead of just figuring out who the murderer is, the viewer must figure out who the werewolf is.  It's like a combination of a Hammer horror movie, Clue: The Movie and The Most Dangerous Game with some blaxploitation thrown in for good measure.

An eccentric black guy (Calvin Lockhart) has too much money and an obsession with hunting.  He has tired of killing mundane creatures and now wishes to hunt the most dangerous game of all...  the werewolf!  He hires a security expert and has video cameras and microphones placed all over his estate and then hosts a dinner party.  To this party, he invites a bunch of white people.  One is an expert on lycanthropy (and is skillfully played by Peter Cushing), one is a convicted cannibal, and the others are just people who have been implicated in horrific murders over the years.  Any one of them could be the werewolf.

The black guy forces them all to stay at his estate until the rising of the full moon will force the werewolf to transform into the beast that it is.  At this point he will be able to hunt it down and put its head on his wall, I guess. It's never really explained what he will do with the trophy once he shoots it.  Anyway, the werewolf is crafty and things don't go as planned.  Innocents are killed, the surveillance equipment is destroyed and still nobody knows who the werewolf is.  That's when the "werewolf break" comes.  The viewer gets 30 seconds to try to figure out who the beast is before the climax of the film.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I liked this movie.  There are no boobies, very little blood and it's not at all scary.  In fact, the "werewolf" is played by a medium-sized German Shepherd.  This is one of the few movies I've reviewed that is probably suitable for kids, but I don't care.  I still recommend it.

Violence Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Booby Rating: 1 out of 5

"Does he look like a bitch?"

Rent The Beast Must Die from GreenCine.com

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

Hammer Horror! Dragon Thrills! The First Kung Fu Horror Spectacular!

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires

We shall end Hammer Horror week with the grindhousiest of the Hammer films; the last of the nine Hammer Dracula movies; the movie so excellent that Christopher Lee turned it down after reading the script... 

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, of course, is not just another Gothic vampire yarn.  It has kung-fu!  It also has nine different titles and some of you may know it as the edited North American version, The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula.  Hammer Film Productions teamed up with the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio in Hong Kong to capitalize on the popularity of the kung-fu films of the early 1970s.  So now the dreaded bloodthirsty creatures are no longer lurking in some dank Transylvanian castle or crypt, they are duking it out in China.

There isn't much of a plot and there doesn't have to be because it has kung-fu dammit!  Dracula rises from the grave after being summoned by a Chinese disciple.  He takes the form of this Asian guy and travels to China to help six vampire brothers who are distressed at losing the seventh member of their gang.  Meanwhile, Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is teaching a university class in China to a group of skeptics who ridicule him for suggesting that vampires are real.  One student does believe him because he and his 

"Shawty wanna l-l-lick me like a lollipop."

brothers and one sister are vampire hunters.  They need Van Helsing's expertise to eradicate the golden vampire minions from their town where these monsters are draining the blood of the local maidens.  The brothers and their sister team up with Van Helsing, his widower son and a wealthy European debutante to confront the six Chinese vampires and the Count Dracula himself... with kung-fu!

I really like this film.  It has Dracula, kung-fu and topless Chinese girls.  What's not to like?  Who cares if some the characters are wooden and irrelevant or that Dracula isn't frightening or really even necessary to the plot.  Somehow it all works for me, but my standards are pretty low.

Here is the trailer for The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires but I must warn you, because of the topless Chinese girls, it's NSFW.

Dracula A.D. 1972: The Count is Back, with an Eye for London's Hotpants... and a Taste for Everything

Dracula A.D. 1972

I will trade blows with any man who tells me that Bela Lugosi was a better Dracula than Christopher Lee.  Ok, maybe not.  But I will argue vehemently and shake my fist.  This is not Lee's best Dracula film, not by a very, very long shot but the campiness of Dracula A.D. 1972 makes it a fun ride.

The strangest element of these later Hammer films is the acting.  Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are simply too damn good for these films.  I'm used to ludicrous story lines and cheesy special effects but usually a similar level of acting prowess accompanies these elements - but  not so with these Hammer films.  Lee and Cushing are great once again in Dracula A.D. 1972.

The film begins in 1872 with a frantic fight scene on a speeding coach between Count Dracula and Dr. Van Helsing.  The coach crashes, Dracula is impaled on a wooden spoke and both he and Van Helsing die as result of the crash.  A follower of The Count arrives at the scene, collects his ashy remains and buries them at a church near Van Helsing's grave.  One hundred years later a bored group of counterculture youths - led by guy who looks strikingly like Dracula's disciple from one hundred years before - decide to practice some good ole fashioned black magic to entertain themselves at the church where Dracula was buried.  But their leader has more sinister motives than just shits 'n giggles.  He performs a blood ritual and calls forth Dracula from the grave which was totally not groovy with the others.

"Get a haircut, hippie."

It just so happens that the buxom blonde in this black magic party is a descendant of Dr. Van Helsing and has a grandfather who is an expert in the occult and looks exactly like the Van Helsing who died one hundred years before.  He figures everything out and goes hunting for the resurrected Dracula and his minions.

If you're looking for the best of the Hammer Dracula films, this isn't it.  I'd recommend something like Horror of Dracula from 1958 as the best of the bunch.  However, if you're looking for a slightly campy and dated vampire tale with beautiful sets and solid acting, check out Dracula A.D. 1972.  It's worth watching.

Twins of Evil: Which is the Virgin? Which is the Vampire?

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Welcome to Hammer Horror Week or... Stop! Hammer Time.

Yes, I'm aware that St. Patrick's Day is this week so I should be dedicating a week to Irish grindhouse films but I don't know of any Irish grindhouse films.  Besides, I'm a sucker for Gothic horror, classic monsters, tight corsets and heaving bosoms.

For those who are unfamiliar with Hammer, let me give a quick outline of who they are, or really who they were.  Hammer Film Productions is a British film company that gained notoriety in the 1960s and '70s with its take on Gothic horror stories and  classic monsters that Universal Studios had popularized in the 1930s such as Dracula, The Mummy , and Frankenstein.  Hammer upped the ante with its monster movies by featuring ample cleavage and a stylized and bloody violence which helped set the stage for the more graphic horror and grindhouse movies of the 1970s and early '80s.  Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were the two leading men during this time in Hammer's history with Cushing often playing the cerebral vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing to Christopher Lee's menacing lady-killer reinvention of Dracula.

Hammer Studios was founded in 1934, but it wasn't until 1955 when Hammer Film Productions released the science fiction movie The Quatermass Xperiment, that it established itself as a force in the horror film market. The movie became the company's biggest hit to date and was one of the few to receive American distribution.  Its success led Hammer to increase its focus and efforts almost exclusively on horror, thus beginning the Hammer era of horror films.  They essentially dominated the horror film market for nearly two decades.

However, by the early 1970s the popularity of Hammer films began to wane in light of a new wave of gritty realism in American and Italian cinema. New grindhouse horror films like Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were more concerned with the real-life, deranged horrors hidden in our own modern society than fictional monsters from the 19th century.  Hammer futilely tried to adapt to these changes.  Dracula A.D. 1972 brought Christopher Lee's vampire lord into groovy modern England, while The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires threw Peter Cushing's Van Helsing into the orient to battle Dracula with kung fu an an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the Shaw Brothers martial arts movies. Other films, such as Vampire Lovers, Twins of Evil and Lust for a Vampire, went beyond the standard Hammer cleavage and occasional topless scene and featured increasing levels of sexuality and nudity.  However, none of this was enough to prevent Hammer from ceasing movie production by the early 1980s. The Hammer era of horror had come to an end.

For those who would like to learn more, a detailed account of the history of Hammer films as well as a complete filmography can be found at www.hammerfilms.com.

So, welcome to Hammer Horror week here on Beasts in Human Skin!  I'll be featuring some of these Hammer hits and misses all week long.