The Beast Within (1982)

The greatest movie ever made..!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Director Philippe Mora has made a career out of very unusual movies from two awful Howling sequels to the mindf**k that was Communion (try making sense of that movie when you are 11 years old!). One of his early efforts was this nonsensical creature feature where everyone seems to be giving earnest performances for better or worse.Beginning in 1964, a newly-wed couple run into road trouble in Jerkwater, Mississippi. The husband (Ronnie Cox) runs off for help, leaving the wife (Bibi Besch) to be ravaged and raped by an unseen monster.Flash forward 17 years and the child offspring of this non- consensual mating is very sick and on life support. Eager to find out what really happened that night they return to Jerkwater, Mississippi and begin to assemble the clues.The first half of this movie is pretty good. There is some atmospheric Panavision photography, sympathetic performances (especially from Cox, before he was typecast as a bad guy), and a pleasing riff of perversion. In the second half it completely falls apart. The "big explanation" does not add up and belongs in a completely different movie. Nothing makes sense at all. I almost feel that two writers bumped into each other in the street, dropped their scripts, gathered up the pages and went into production not knowing that their pages were mixed up. I can see why this has never become a classic. It might have been a decent VHS rental back in the 80s when no one knew any better but this film has rightly fallen into obscurity in the modern era.

If you like low to medium budget horrors with plenty of gore, you will not be disappointed in this and Paul Clemens does very well in the lead. Nobody else seems to try too hard, they seem more interested in outdoing each other in wearing the most outlandish wigs. Very watchable despite its shortcomings although it almost comes to a halt on several occasions. The set up is fine, if a little predictable, but the wild and terrible story could have been better told. At first this seems like a Jekyll and Hyde variant, then a vampire tale before it gets back to what it really was at the start, a gruesome tale of rape and impregnation by some swamp like creature. Nice idea and lots of nastiness but not very convincing and too many people wandering in and out to little effect. Have to say though, one amazing and absolutely disgusting transformation sequence at the end.

After looking at the cover, I thought I was going to be watching a movie about a werewolf. He kind of looks like teen wolf on it. Instead of this guy being a werewolf, he was more of a bug-man beast. Basically same story of a generic werewolf film, just replaced with bug-man beast.I was honestly kind of bored with this one. The pace is pretty slow. Acting not so great. Story was a little confusing and just kind of dumb. I thought the transformation scene was cool. That was about it unfortunately and even that seemed to be ripping off other werewolf films. First and last time I'll watch this one.

The changing into a monster of a young man is used as a metaphor for boys growing into men. The body goes through changes and urges become more primal. Suddenly playing center field for your baseball team is less alluring than chasing skirts. THE BEAST WITHIN perfectly captures this sentiment.The film focuses on teenage Michael (Paul Clemens) who has an illness that the doctors can't identify. It seems that young Michael is changing into a beast--one that resembles a humanoid creature that sexually assaulted his mother seventeen years ago. His parents, played by Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch, try to learn more about what happened seventeen years ago and venture to the town where she was raped by the monster: a sleepy, backwoods Mississippi community. They leave Michael at the hospital but he breaks out and some urge lures him to the small town his parents are visiting.While in this small Mississippi hamlet, Michael begins to succumb to urges: eating flesh and chasing the local hotty (Kitty Moffat). But these urges aren't your normal teenage male pursuits and Michael fears for Amanda's (Moffat) safety when he learns that members of her family are being targeted by a serial killer--the beast within.STORY: $$$ (The story is quite interesting. We get a nice little isolated setting with eccentric hillbilly characters who all seem to harbor a dark secret. Cox and Besch as the concerned parents try their hardest to uncover the secrets so they can save their child. The script builds enough suspense to sustain interest but the falling down of females in the woods seems a bit foolish. Bibi runs into a tree and Kitty looses her bearings too easily).ACTING: $$$$ (A helluva lot better than you see in the usual B-Rate film. Clemens is terrific as young Michael. His scenes where his body changes are brilliant displays of acting. He masterfully portrays agony. L.Q. Jones shines as the town sheriff, Mike's parents only real ally in the backwoods community. The underrated Ronny Cox is great as Mike's dad. He knows that Michael isn't his son but still shows him the amount of love he'd show a boy direct from his loins. Don Gordon and John Dennis Johnston are effectively slimy as backwoods villains and Kitty Moffat is solid in the role of Michael's forbidden fruit. But the best piece of acting belongs to Bibi Besch. There's little for her to do in the script but Bibi gets more out of this character than most actresses could extract. There's a scene, in which Miss Besch has no dialogue, where she learns that her son is becoming something akin to the monster that raped her years ago. Bibi exhibits such raw emotion in the scene that you, the viewer, know exactly what is going through her mind without her having to say a word. Give Bibi a standing ovation).NUDITY: $$$ (What would be a movie about teen lust without a little titillation? Bibi is stripped bare in the woods by a monster at the beginning of the film while Kitty Moffat suffers the same treatment at the close of the film. Creepy morgue attendant Luke Askew also spends some time ogling a buxom dead body in his morgue).