HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 46
3rd of 6 films with a person of color as director or lead. (excluding Asian)

Oh no! It's an Amicus movie kinda like Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None but with a werewolf and I didn't like it! This is not right - not right at all...

Trust me, I couldn't have come into this prepared to be more indulgent of any possible flaws - because there were bound to be some. But I was expecting adorable sorts of problems. I mean, on top of everything else, this is a 1970's British genre flick with a black protagonist. I didn't think such a thing existed. And on top of on top of all that, this film features my beloved Peter Cushing. Sporting a Swedish accent, no less. What the hell happened here? I want to speak to whoever's in charge IMMEDIATELY!!!

But seriously, man, although this hummed with all the sorts of quirky 70's genre aesthetic touches I love... I just had to admit about 40 minutes into this that I was really getting bored. I started pinning all my hopes on the appearance of the werewolf to redeem it all (a familiar feeling to any werewolf movie completists out there... hey, the transformation scene almost made The Howling 4 watchable, so don't sneer) but, well. You may have heard tell about the "werewolf" in The Beast Must Die. Look, if my 9-year-old daughter was in a school play where a werewolf was played by a German shepherd with a fur ruff stuck around its neck, I'd probably boo loudly. I'm not about to tolerate it in an actual movie, for fuck's sake.

There's such a good cast in this too. Calvin Lockhart is OK (not sure what was up with his character though, talk about being the architect of your own downfall, he really should have just kept his fucking nose out of it - bloody do-gooder), but we also have Anton Diffring. Charles Gray! Michael Gambon!!! But they all look like they've been chowing down on Quaaludes and NOT mixing them with alcohol (rookie error). Cushing is a lot of fun - I could listen to his silly Swedish accent all day long - but the rest of them barely bother.

I don't know - I've heard some other folks like this one a lot, so maybe I just need to figure out how to get on its wavelength. Maybe I was in a grumpy impatient mood when I saw this. But I was seriously disappointed with this one.

:(