Gonna Git Ya Dogbreath!
A Customer from Edinburgh,
23rd October, 2009
This is without a doubt my favourite British blaxploitation whodunnit werewolf movie! Which is a bit like saying that 'Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster' is the best film ever made in which Japanese hippies dress up as fish. Basically, the plot concerns a very rich but very bored big game hunter, who, in a nice variant on the 'great white hunter' stereotype, is black. In fact, unless there's some recent film I'm unaware of, Calvin Lockhart remains the only black actor to play the lead in a British horror movie. Watching this film, you can see why; he is possibly the worst black actor ever to appear on film who isn't a rapper trying to become a movie star or Mario Van Peebles. Anyway, our hero decides that since he has hunted every dangerous animal that officially exists, he might as well start on the non-existent ones. Therefore he invites a group of people to his country estate for the weekend, knowing that one of them is a werewolf. Trouble is, he doesn't know which, and neither do they. And then he locks them in, loads his rifle, and prowls around in a PVC bondage suit (yes, really!) while the werewolf tries not to get shot, and everybody else tries not to get eaten. This amazingly silly film is obviously meant to be taken perfectly seriously - it's actually quite gory for the time - but even Peter Cushing, who can normally be relied on to give a decent performance no matter how bad the script is, seems to think he's in a comedy and lapses into an absurd vaguely Germanic accent. Given the lines he has to speak, you can't blame him - the whole farrago is oddly similar to how 'Fawlty Towers' might have been if Manuel had had lycanthropy. Apparently the werewolf was played by a dog with hair extensions. This one definitely deserves the much-abused 'so bad it's good' label. And yes, they really do stop the film for 30 seconds so that enthusiastic cinemagoers could shout out who they thought the werewolf was. Or more likely, 'Get on with it!'
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