#This movie is a bit weird. The writers seem to have had an idea for a movie, but no plausible way to set it up. And so they just decided to declare it by fiat. The idea is that a millionaire hunter has invited eight people to his island. He knows one of them is a werewolf and wants to hunt him down, because The beast must die.1 What they couldn’t explain is how he knows this. Frankly, I couldn’t either.
Before things start going down, two of the guests are wiling away time at the chessboard. And one of them is played by Peter Cushing! Apparently, he doesn’t just do vampires but werewolves, too.
And his experience shows: he has the wherewithal to place a large, opaque goblet right next to the board to obfuscate the proceedings on it. He has largely succeeded. The following is a very, very dubious reconstruction:2
Yes, it’s very disappointing.3 Even the positioning of the pieces on the queen’s side, which is closest to the camera, is highly dubious, because the players are quite bad at centring their pieces on the squares.
They’re also just bad at placing their pieces, as evidenced by the fact that white moves his king here, I think to g2. This movie isn’t great, but that’s definitely the low point.
Realism: 1/5 That number is a bit unfair, since the position is mostly conjectural, but any other number would be at least as unfair.
Probable winner: Black. He is already up quite some material and there’s another queen to come. If there isn’t a mate somewhere.
1. [Presumably because he made some blind people see.] ↩
2. [A not-at-all dubious diagram editor.] ↩
3. [Clearly, there should have been a knight sacrifice.] ↩