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The Beast Within (1982)

Dir: Philippe Mora.

This stodgy 80’s horror opus starts with Eli and Caroline MacCready (Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch) breaking down near the small Mississippi town of Nioba. Leaving Caroline in the car (as all self-respecting men in dodgy horror flicks do) Eli goes to find a garage. When he gets back he discovers his wife has been savaged and raped by an unseen assailant.

Seventeen years later their Son Michael (Paul Clemens) is in a hospital suffering from a rare genetic disease that the Doctors cannot trace to either parents. Afraid Michael will die, Eli and Caroline go back to Nioba to try and discover more about the rapist. They go to Judge Curwin (Don Gordon) posing as crime writers to find out more details, but the Judge tells them nothing. So they go to see Sheriff Pool (L Q Jones). He tells them that the suspect in the rape case, Lionel Curwin, was found ripped apart in the remains of his house years ago.

Meanwhile, Michael has run away from the hospital and gone to Nioba, where he is guided by some force to Lionel Curwins house. In the cellar he finds what has been calling him. He is found by Amanda Platt (Kitty Moffat) Daughter of Lionel Curwin’s vicious Cousin Horace, who is also cousin to the Judge. Amanda takes him to the local Doctor (R G Armstrong) and Eli and Caroline are shocked to find him in the town and also seemingly in good health. Michael refuses to leave as he has (amazingly quickly!) fallen for Amanda.

Michael is now getting stranger and speaking in the voice of a Billy Connor who went missing many years ago after sleeping with Lionel’s wife and soon a link to the Curwin family and murder is obvious.
Before long Michael is undergoing an horrific change into a monster cicada bug, that has vengeance on it’s mind against the remaining Curwins…

 

As you can see there is just too much plot going on here! The basic premise is a normal monster on the loose idea, but the film gets bogged (no pun intended) down in a confusing reincarnation premise and a complex family secret plot (the screenplay was written by Tom “Fright Night” Holland from a novel by Edward Levy) that takes too much time introducing the many characters when it should be dishing out some more meaty murders.

The gore on display is pretty good. Edwin’s death is nicely bloody and there is a juicy half eaten body effect when he is found, but Dexter’s death is boring and we then have to sit through too much tedious talking to get to the full on monster-stomp ending. And it’s an ending that’s a classic example of overblown 80’s, American horror film making. If there was one type of effect that was used to death in the 80’s it was the ‘bladder’ effect.
We all remember it from too many shoddy films, rubber balloons are inflated under latex skin to wow the audience with ‘shocking’ transformation scenes. “The Beast Within” (courtesy of Thomas Burman) has one of the most gratuitous in horror history (only beaten in it’s silly, over the top handling by the unfortunate James Olson’s outrageous bubbling face in the same years “Amityville Horror 2”) and now looks so inept that laughter is created not shocks.

Add to this one of the worst rubber monster heads ever seen and it’s a ‘so bad it’s good’ event that just makes sitting through the rest of the film worthwhile. Only a later decapitation raises the standard but that is then undermined by the actual creature, which is no more than a slimy body suit with a big head. And before you ask, I have no idea why Michael turns into a big man-bug, this is never explained. The rapes (especially the second one) although brief, add a more than usual air of sleaze to the proceedings and are at least shot so as to be suitably unpleasant looking.

The film though looks flat and lifeless as too many American 80’s films did. It may be the fault of the infamous film stock that was around then, or just plain dull cinematography. The dullness is carried on into the score by Les Baxter, who was famous for re-scoring some of AIP’s versions of Mario Bava movies. Here we have music so bland, dead air would sound more interesting. Surprisingly the film was Co-Produced by “The Omen” Producer Harvey Bernhard, now there’s someone who should have known better.

The cast, now that’s a bit more interesting. We not only have a before fame, but after "Deliverance", appearance by Ronny Cox ("Robocop") but veteran supporting players LQ Jones (who worked with everyone from Pekinpah to Scorsese) and R.G. Armstrong (who could go from comedy spaghetti westerns like “My Name is Nobody” to gore classics like “Evilspeak” with practiced ease) and it’s always a pleasure to watch old pros at work. Armstrong (with a ripe southern accent that the characters only seem to adopt when they remember to) is given a dull part though and is more subdued than normal, but Jones handles the more interesting sheriff role with due vigour.

The second rate proceedings are not helped by a glaring continuity error where we see Amanda put her bra on twice! Add some rubbish dialogue, like when the Doc after fleeing the scene of the wildly over the top, gloop covered monster transformation says to the sheriff “something terrible’s happening in there” (no shit!), silly behaviour by characters (they all just watch Michael’s long transformation, even though one character is holding a shotgun, without doing anything until it’s too late) and snooze inducing direction by the hack Mora, who also spewed out “The Howling 2 & 3” on unfortunate movie goers, and you have a film that is barely worth the price of a rental.

Enjoy the silly effects and smatterings of gore, then kick yourself for not finding something better to do with your precious time on this Earth.