Days 165 and 166

This weekend I caught a cold. On Saturday, I could feel my throat getting sore and by the time a woke up on Sunday it had developed in a full blow cold. Nose running like no-one’s business, a throbbing, confused head and the rest of me feeling totally done in.

So, plenty of orange juice, Sudafed and ibuprofen, watching a few episodes of Castle, the film The Beast Must Die and not much else ☹

The Beast Must Die is a great horror film from the early seventies and is essentially an Agatha Christie country house murder mystery with added werewolves. The special effects for the Beast are pretty terrible (it’s basically a German Shepard) and not scary (although it did terrify me when I was ten and first saw it on the telly), but the story is very entertaining – a hunter sets up his country estate to be completely secure and monitored (by cutting edge seventies tech, which is weird to watch now given technological advances seen the film was made), invites guests who he suspects may be a werewolf, including Peter Cushing as an expert on werewolves, for the weekend, which coincides with a full moon, so that he can hunt and kill the werewolf.

The cast (Calvin Lockhart, Peter Cushing, Marlene Clark, Michael Gambon, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring, Ciaran Madden, and Tom Chadbon) is great (they keep things serious, while outing in a few tongue in the cheek or raised eyebrow moments), the soundtrack is great, it’s proper seventies, funky and wah-wah full, and is begging to the sampled, and there’s a werewolf break near the end of the film, where the film is paused and we the audience get a shown a summary of the clues and have thirty seconds to decide who is the werewolf.

I highly recommend this film for anyone who wants an enjoyable hour and a half of seventies horror (with a soupcon of humour).

Castle was a Tv series about the mystery writer Richard Castle, who shadowed NYPD detective Kate Beckett, to get inspiration for his novels. As the show progresses they also re-open the investigation into the death of Beckett’s mother, in which they discover a conspiracy of hitmen, corrupt cops, drug dealers, corrupt politicians and spies. I really liked Castle because it had a great cast and characters and fun stories, although there were plenty of stories that were dark (the parent kidnapping their own child, 3XK and the dirty nuclear bomb). It was great TV where you could escape the world for 40ish minutes and just be entertained and I highly recommend it (although there are issues with the last season and it wasn't as good as the proceeding seasons).