The Beast (1977)

The greatest movie ever!

Dreadfully Boring

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

I viewed this theatrical masterpiece (Ha, Ha) on Netflix today, and I must say that it caught me completely off guard. This movie attempts to convey the message as to what lengths women will go to satisfy their most erotic inner fantasies. As soon as the movie starts one sees the stallion with his gigantic phallus swinging wildly as he proudly struts about prior to mounting the mare, and then as his member frantically and blindly searches for her pleading vagina until finally achieving full penetration.The movie then goes about showing the participating actors and their appropriate parts in the plot. After that things start to get very interesting as everyone anxiously awaits the Cardinal's arrival. We are then shown that the lazy butler is very sexually involved with the groom's horny sister, and that the groom is a certainly very weird individual. We also get to see the Priest caressing and mouth kissing one of his choir boys (to be expected, of course).The rest of the movie involves the bride-to-be getting extremely horny and experiencing very erotically charged dreams with a super sexually endowed wolf man that ejaculates like an eternally open faucet more frequently than is possible under any circumstances. I definitely enjoyed this movie and would recommend to all viewers that they see it together with their partners.

this movie had a fairly good sounding plot, but the paste was very slow... very slow indeed. even if someone thinks this is a cult classic, i think that there are a lot better films from that era to be watched.the cinematography is not excellent, but not the worst either. the sounds are OK. lighting OK.i still wouldn't recommend this to anyone else than maybe a film-student.the movie does not contain music, and the horses having sex don't make it a good one either. and the woman masturbating on the edge of the bed was plain stupid.no winnings here, skip this utter boredom. i've seen worse believe me, but this is just waste of time, and i don't get the good reviews here. especially the high ratings...

La Bête is one of those 70's European "art-films" that you hear people discussing on culture programmes and on the Internet, without ever really believing that it actually got made. I first came across it during a Film Four extreme season... the film being preceded by the obligatory Mark Kermode introduction, in which he talked about the shocking and confrontational imagery and the supposed artistic merits, before waxing lyrical on the history of the film's director, Walerian Borowczyk. Having already seen a number of the confrontational relics to the original "new European extreme" I wasn't expecting anything truly shocking... however, when a film opens on an image of a horse's moist, erect privates, you have to read just yours senses slightly.The film, as an artistic statement thirty-years on, is no masterpiece. In fact, it's quite poor to be honest. But Kermode's assessment, that this is a film like no other, is absolutely true. As he had done with his previous film, the soft-core erotica of the Immoral Tales, Borowczyk seems to be intent on pushing the audience's buttons (no real problem with that). As you would expect from a film that tows the line between the art-house and the grind-house, the film presents shocking scenes of intimacy and, indeed, faux-bestiality, wrapped up in a sleek pretentious veneer that seems to be aiming for the style of Burtolucci's early masterpiece, The Conformist.As well as the images of animal-intimacy, the film also throws in issues of pregnancy, rape, the class divide (master and servants, and all that) and inter-racial lust. It's all empty provocation of course, with Borowczyk unable (or unwilling) to tie any of this into some kind of message or theme, instead falling back on over-the-top sex-scenes and cringe-worthy prosthetics. In comparison to other controversial and confrontational statements of the same era- particularly films like In the Realm of the Senses and Pasolini's Salo - it's a bit of a one-note (or one-joke) film... sure, it's original, but it's empty too, and often quite dull. It's also not as beautiful (in the photographic sense) as some viewers have noted, with the overall look and design of the film paling in comparison to films like The Canterbury Tales, Barry Lyndon, 1900, Godard's Weekend, the above-mentioned In the Realm of the Senses and even moments of Borowczyk's own Immoral Tales (...and that's not counting the hundreds of even more beautiful films made before or since).Thus, La Bête seems a little out of place... too pretentious to be taken seriously as a piece of exploitation, and too slight and unintelligent to appeal to the chin-stroking intellectuals. It's never clear whom the film is supposed to be aimed at... with La Bête only really offering any interest to the viewer in a curious "car-crash" sense. Still, a lot of people seem to like it, perhaps because of the negative stigma often attached to viewers who don't seem to grasp these supposedly deep works of Euro-genius (or perhaps they just like the film)? At any rate, I don't want to be the person to crap all over a much-loved film, but for me, La Bête was just a tired and tiresome throwback to the days of the sleazy 70's... which is, in light of similarly minded films of the same era, really quite poor.

Nope, I am just not going to get with it here. I refuse to go along with the program. Don't you supposed that perhaps this movie is just a tad over-rated? Look at the reader comments and their star ratings: Most are 6/10, 7/10 or better. I think this is an instance when the ratings may say more about the people rendering them than the movie itself, which is unique. How many other sex fantasies about simulated bestiality complete with horse couplings have become mainstream hits as catalog DVD titles? I watched this movie with a pervading sense of anticipation, expecting fireworks, and instead got someone popping a Gucci shopping bag. It looked great, but once the thrill had been spent even the twist ending didn't do much to save it.The film's background story says it all: Director films about 25 minutes of borderline hardcore fake bestial sex for another movie, is informed the footage will not be appropriate, sets it aside, waits two or three years for a smattering of critical acclaim to build up, then constructs an entire feature around that 25 minutes, filming roughly 70 minutes of otherwise unrelated, excruciatingly boring footage and inserting the 25 minute chunk in as a dream sequence. That the 25 minutes of film in question is strikingly odd, original and shocking in a deliberate, calculated manner goes without saying. But we aren't here to evaluate that 25 minutes alone, we must consider the entire film, and ask ourselves why people are so enthusiastic about the movie? Or are they just enamored by it's background story and history of having been banned by people who were stupid enough to be offended by it?Perhaps it is an anti-clerical agenda that appeals to them. Hating the western religions of catholicism and Christianity is one of the few remaining socially acceptable bastions of intolerance -- Just today it was revealed that the BBC routinely skews their broadcasts with anti Christian & anti Western sentiment in the furtherance of political correctness. You can say anything you want about the Bible, pedopheliac priests, the institutionalized cruelty of the church, and how much white men and their inhuman religions suck the dimpled skin off a golf ball ... But say one negative thing about non-westernized religions, and you are toast. This movie was tailor made for such a sentiment, with a wrinkly old dried up priest who has an entirely unwholesome on screen relationship with two pretty 14 year old French boys complete with inappropriate touching, fawning, fondling, fumbling, groping, and patting of the backsides. Ewww.And then there is the horse couplings, photographed in such fetishistic closeup detail that portions of the film could be used as visual aids for a biology class on animal husbandry. Yes I understand the thematic relevance of the imagery -- large animal phallus's with a wealth of reproductive fluids just waiting to be unleashed like fire extinguishers -- but if I wanted to watch horses, you know, do it, I would like go live on a farm. Having their genitals in my face is about as entertaining as watching someone use a bathroom.Is this movie just a sort of artsy diversion for social deviants? Probably, though I will grant the artistic execution of most of it, filmed in a kind of arty Euro detail that even has a dappled forest pond right out of a Monet painting, complete with a spanning arched bridge. And the ending (which even I managed to be surprised by) does sort of wrap it all up into a neat if distasteful package. But you have to remember that there are certain things that cannot be deconstructed for their design elements and many artists are guilty for exploiting them in their work to lend a sort of gravitas that would not have been achieved without it. That isn't fair, and even Clint Eastwood has fallen prey to the urge with his new movie about Iwo Jima. Whether or not his film is any good stands as a separate consideration from whether or not that battle was a noble cause fought by men who were heroes. The problem is that most people will not be able to separate out the two aspects of the movie and will be lining up to give it Oscars because of it's noble message -- not because it is a particularly good or original movie.While it may seem like an odd parallel, I see one with THE BEAST: How can anyone not see the basic beauty of nature in the sight of two horses mating? And who cannot see the logical culmination of the repressed sexuality from fairy tales in the film's explosive set-piece where Beauty and the Beast finally do the nasty? Somehow I managed to miss both points, and am delighted that I have seen this film so that I can trash it as being what it really is: 25 minutes or so of eye opening over the top adult fairy tale imagery surrounded by 70 minutes of skull drainingly boring artsy-fartsy Euro Trash dreck about some guy getting a haircut, and a great ending. It's art for sure, but it sucks hard.3/10