The Beast Within

Rating:
Summary: Philippe Mora's The Beast Within
Review: It is always sad to see name actors reduced to taking icky gross horror films just to pay a mortgage. Ronny Cox and L.Q. Jones are very good here, and Meshach Taylor looks the same here as he does now, almost twenty years later...hey, that is the creepiest thing about this film.

Two newlyweds in 1965 get stuck on a lonely highway in Mississippi, and the guy walks back up the highway for help. A monster happens by, as they often do, kills the dog, and rapes the new bride. Seventeen years later, the offspring son of that rape is having medical problems, and the now older married couple make like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys Mysteries, going back to the small town near where she was attacked, hoping to find clues as to who the raping father was. The son follows, develops a thirst for blood (as one is wont to do in the backwater southern U.S.), and attacks people related to a murder from years before. At this point, I began to lose track of most of the names of characters and the stereotypical rubes they trot out just because this is how Hollywood thinks people from the south act. You would think Cox would have learned his lesson after "Deliverance." Eventually, we find out the bride was attacked by the local chained up cannibal, who somehow has been reincarnated in its offspring's body. Gore and mayhem soon follow.

There are incredible leaps in logic here that are never explained. How does the son know to follow the parents to the small town? Why does Cox get to ride with the cops and basically have his run of things? At one point, a character asks the same question, and he is never answered either. How did the creature get the power to take over the identity of his son, shedding his offspring's skin like a snake? Why does the creature resemble a giant brown Pillsbury dough boy, covered in sugary glaze? We probably will never know.

The film has a good, expensive look to it, but we are treated to a rube who slaps his teenage girl around, not one but TWO scenes of the creature raping women he finds passed out in the woods, and one of the longest transformation scenes ever put on film. I am surprised no cast member checked their watch as they watched the teenage son turn into the raping, human flesh eating creature. Everyone just stands, stares, and gasps. An abrupt ending is just the slime on the cake of one icky film. "The Beast Within" is without merit. I do not recommend it.

This is rated (R) for physical violence, gun violence, sexual violence, strong gore, profanity, female nudity, some sexual content, and adult situations.

Rating:
Summary: Collinsville
Review: One of the films in this set really stands out: Collinsville. It has great production values for a lowbudget film, interesting charcters, is well shot in cool locations. It exceeded my expectations, and has ONE HELL OF A TWIST near the end. Watch it and you'll see what im talking about. 4 out of 5 stars. dizzy.

Rating:
Summary: The script without.
Review: The Beast Within (Phillippe Mora, 1982)

I have been a huge fan of Edward Levy's two novels since they originally came out. Thus, when a film version of The Beast Within appeared not long after the novel, I was thrilled. As I was still underage at the time, I had to wait until it popped up on video to actually see it, however. I remember being disappointed that the beginning of Levy's book didn't make it into the film, but that's about it.

That was twenty years ago, and I just watched The Beast Within again to see if I'd overlooked anything the first time around. I did. I overlooked how awful the whole movie is.

Mora began his career with two very well-received documentaries before turning his attention to fictional subjects. His first big-screen drama, Mad Dog Morgan, has its defenders. The Beast Within was his next movie, and from that point on, I don't think he's made a single film defended by anyone but studio execs looking for a quick buck. In this version of the story (cf. my review of Levy's novel for what this is really supposed to be about), we open with something raping a newlywed. Cut to seventeen years later, when the son of said something and said newlywed is dying of an undisclosed pituitary gland problem. Except that when he gets out of the hospital and drinks blood, he gets temporarily better. (No, since I know that's what you're thinking, this isn't a vampire movie. It's something far, far stupider.)

All of the plausibility that Levy puts into the first fifty pages of the novel (which are condensed into a monologue at the beginning of the film, with time changes that make it utterly unbelievable) is missing. All of the tension of the book's scenario has been erased by the elimination of one of the book's main characters and a complete change of relationship for the remaining two. The book's thoroughly cheesy, thoroughly wonderful ending has been utterly abandoned. The script for this (which was written by Tom Holland, also responsible for such script classics as Psycho II, Cloak and Dagger, and The Langoliers) may have remotely resembled the book in the first draft, but by the time it got to the filming stage, it was a completely different beast. (There is a meditation to be made on the metatheatrical aspects of the script as parallel to the main character, but the movie disgusts me to the point where I'm not willing to be the one to write it.)

Given that, the film has to be looked at as a completely separate entity from the book. Is it any good if you slice off Edward Levy's name? Absolutely not. The highly-touted special effects are so fake as to be funny (though some of them you'll recognize from later films, which makes me wonder if there was some sort of influence stemming from this, as scary as the idea is). The story is a basic rehash of a number of different movies. It COULD have been done well (in fact, Harry Bromley Davenport would take a good deal of this material, stick it into a sci-fi framework, add some pieces of its contemporary E.T., and come up with the brilliant XTRO a year later). But it's impossible to watch this film, even if you're not a filmmaker yourself, and see hundreds of places where Mora could have done better with camerawork, editing, lighting, or any of another twenty or so aspects of directing a movie. Otherwise good actors like Don Gordon (Papillon, The Final Conflict), L. Q. Jones (The Virginian), and Luke Askew (South of Heaven, West of Hell) are wasted in oceans of overacting.

If you're a fan of Edward Levy's wonderful novel, I suggest you forget this movie exists. In fact, that goes for the rest of you, as well. I tried to find a single redeeming quality about this film, and the only thing that came to mind is "if someone else tries to do Levy's novel, they can't do any worse." (zero)

Rating:
Summary: WOWSERS!!!!!!
Review: This is the original frightfest that my sister and nephew bragged about sooo many years ago about. That was 1982 folks! i purchased this dvd a couple of years back just because i thought of them. I remember all the chats about how horrible the scary parts were. well, it was laughable now but i bet really gross then? this is the kinda flick designed to keep you company on a lonely Friday or Saturday night folks! the story involves a woman who had been raped one night and eventually got pregnant from her attacker...a weird bug cicada creature. The reason for the attack stemmed from him wanting to secure his revenge on his enemies. Only by returning via his offspring can he carry about his malevolent plan. Cicadas sleep under the earth for 17 years and then return in the summer to eat and spawn and that's the basis of the creature in this flick. Unfortunately for his son life will be shortlived and rather ugly since he never gets to live out his dreams, love his girlfriend nor get out of such a boring town? Just where in the world is this town anyway? The directors and creators of this wacky freight fest state that "absolutely no one will be able to widthstand the last few minutes of this film!" Well, I did and it was nice to see a shoe string budget horror flick be both gross and disturbing while still maintaining a somewhat cohesive plot? There are no REAl stars but it did include actor Meshach Taylor (from Designing Women fame) who plays a minimal part in this wacky fest. I recommend this weird movie to all of you who enjoy cheesy horror movies and the like. I just wish the plot would have been a little better but that's ok. I just wanted to know why Meshach always played bit parts in horror flicks? At least he didn't get split in half like he did in THE OMEN 2. Yikes!

Rating:
Summary: The Beast Within
Review: This is the word for word description from the back of the Blockbuster case:

In the Southern swamps a woman is raped by a demented subhuman creature. 17 years later her son goes beserk and begins a transformation into a cicada-like monster that takes revenge on the townspeople involved in a grim secret.

I've been sitting here for like twenty minutes and I can't think of anything to say that would be funnier.