The Beast

Notorious for more than a quarter century (and often banned), it's obscurity was its greatest asset it seems. Hey, it's often better to be talked about, rather than actually seen when you can't back the "legend" up with substance.

The film has played in Los Angeles a couple of times recently, and is available on home video, so that veil is slowly being lifted. While there is still plenty to offend the masses, it is more likely to bore them, than arouse much real passion. Except for a gratuitous and protracted XXX sex scene between a pair of horses ("Nature Documentary" anyone?), there follows nearly an hour of a dull arranged marriage melodrama.

Once the sex and nudity begins, it is a nonstop sequence involving masturbation, a looooooooong flashback to an alleged 'beauty and the beast' encounter, and a naked woman running around the mansion (nobody, even her supposedly protective Aunt, seems to even think of putting some clothes on her!). On video, I guess you can fast-forward thru the banality, but it's not really worth the effort. The nudity doesn't go beyond what is seen in something much more substantive such as Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS.

Try as one might to find some 'moral' or 'symbolism' in the carnality, I doubt it's worthy of anyone's effort. Unfortunately, for LA BETE, now that you can more easily see the film, the notoriety of something once 'forbidden' has been lifted. And this beast has been tamed.

Banned for twenty odd years 'The Beast' has finally been unleashed, and believe me it is a movie quite unlike any other! This is a profoundly bizarre mixture of arthouse and grindhouse that is on the surface massively offensive (in a word - bestiality), but is presented in such a ludicrous fashion that the only genuine reaction is to laugh hysterically. The sequences involving the Beast which made the film notorious are only a small part of the whole. In fact it is the contrast between the Beastly and non-Beastly stories that make this movie so strange and difficult to explain. I don't know exactly what director Borowczwk was aiming for, and I'm not sure he did either. But if he was going for a strange mixture of the Gothic, the surreal and hysterical porno comedy he certainly succeeded!

OK...this one's a weirdy....Honestly, I can't tell you all the inner plot-points of THE BEAST, cuz I started losing interest when nothing happened during the first 45 or more minutes - but just wait, it definitely does "pick up"...

The plot involves something about a monster in the woods that some French aristocrat chick screwed back in the day. Eventually you see "THE BEAST", which looks like a guy dressed in a giant rat-bear costume with a horse cock attached to it. The scene takes place with the aristocrat woman running around the forest looking for a lost sheep. The sheep ends up dead and the woman gets scared. THE BEAST pops up, rapes the chick and shoots 400 gallons of spunk all over her. Eventually the chick starts to enjoy the beast's "attention" which results in some pretty novel simulated sex scenes, including an unnervingly erotic foot masturbation scene where the woman jerks the beast off with her feet while the monster shoots more huge loads everywhere (yeah, I've got a twisted foot-fetish - so sue me....)...The whole film is told in flashbacks and long-winded dialog scenes that tended to be a bit tedious. A "shocking" but predictable ending concludes this extremely strange film...

THE BEAST is a film that I find kind of hard to rate. The cinematography itself is quite eye-catching and the sets, costumes and locations are elaborate. The plot is a little convoluted and seems to take it self awfully seriously for what ends up being such an unintentionally hilarious film about a chick boning a rat-bear. A good bit of tits, ass, and hairy 70's French bushes to help make up for the dull first half of the film. I have to honestly say, that if it weren't for the graphic scenes of the BEAST spackling all over the willing maiden, this film would have been a real bore - that is unless you like dull dialog and some graphic horse sex (the beginning has a VERY up-close and personal scene of two horses boning, including a pulsating and spunk covered female horse vagina...YUM!!!). But the BEAST sex scene is so strange and such a refreshing change from the rest of the film, that I have to say that those scenes alone make up for what otherwise would have been a real snoozer. I have to recommend this one to anyone who thinks they've seen it all - the BEAST rape really is out-there and something to be witnessed. Also recommended to any fans of 70's/80's sleaze films - this one ranks pretty high with them. Worth a look for you sick rat-bear beastiality lovers out there (like me)...8/10

This is the only film I have ever seen which attempts to mix a fairy tale, a sort of comedy of manners and faked explicit bestiality. It is quite nicely filmed but appallingly acted. The climax (ah hem!!) is according to taste either hilarious, repulsive or erotic(????). Watch it if you are (a) a pervert (b) have an insatiable curiosity about the wilder extremes of film (c) a strong stomach. In todays homogenised marketplace it at least deserves it's place as a one of a kind gem. NB not suitable for (a) children (b) born-again christians (c) first dates.

NOTE: This film was recommended to me by Zachary George Najarian-Najafi for "Steve Pulaski Sees It."

Walerian Borowczyk's La Bête is a seriously grotesque film, but unless you have the patience to make it through about an hour of glacially paced exposition, you won't realize why. In terms of going from zero to one-hundred in terms of plot-escalation, La Bête takes the cake with positioning itself like an ordinary, albeit slightly off-kilter, melodrama about an arranged relationship in a close-knit family, before becoming a zoophiliac's ultimate cinematic desire.

The story opens following the death of a businessman named Philip Broadhurst, who leaves his estate to his daughter Lucy (Lisbeth Hummel) with the only condition being that she be married to a man named Mathurin (Pierre Benedetti) by the brother of Pierre's uncle within the next six months. Despite Mathurin's mental deficiencies and deformities, Lucy still agrees to marry him, with her and her aunt Virginia (Elisabeth Kaza) taking a trip to the Pierre's brother's farmhouse. At the farmhouse, Lucy learns of a two-hundred-year-old fairytale about a beast living in the woods adjacent to the farmhouse.

For about an hour, we endure ostensibly neverending conversation between this enormous family-to-be, none of it really amounting to anything other than frustration due to the lack of human interest and a great deal of pointless sermonizing about family and the marital bond. It isn't until the hour mark that Borowczyk, also the screenwriter here, flips the switch and turns La Bête into something cruelly twisted. Without giving too much away, for much of the final thirty minutes of this film need be experienced, the film involves a dark, twisted dream sequence (or maybe not) of Lucy's intimate, sexual relationship with the aforementioned beast.

Borowczyk doesn't hold back in what he wants the audience to see in La Bête, so much so that he's willing to show us a bear ejaculating and performing cunnilingus on Lucy, resulting in Lucy enduring a series of bloody scratches. No taboo in beastiality is left untouched as the film details some of the most wicked sexual perversions you're likely to see come to life on screen in your life. Me being so young, I feel I have a ways to go, which only works to keep me up at night even more.

As an art film, La Bête is rather tasteful up until its final act. The film is nicely shot, with numerous, intimate camera angles taking the place of the predictable scuzzy aesthetic one would expect this film to have, in addition to having several nicely decorated sets and some solid exterior shots of the forest where much of this action happens. As a pornographic film, La Bête is most artful in a sense, but the porn itself is anything but erotic. It almost feels like shock value, especially when we must endure numerous closeups of a gigantic bear ejaculating repeatedly.

La Bête is a curious oddity, destined to gather dust on the seldom surviving, family-owned VHS stores where ultra-weird, almost unspeakable cult classic, and some just stopping at "cult," films precariously placed on towering shelves. I can almost envision an ordinary, black VHS tape with a color-faded, peeling white label with "The Beast" written in pencil, discolored and sun-damaged to look like simple hashmarks, sitting on the shelf looking unassuming and innocent but bearing quite the visual wallop. That's precisely what La Bête is; a visual wallop not for the faint of heart. I'm sure Lucy herself would say something similar.

Starring: Lisbeth Hummel, Pierre Benedetti, and Elisabeth Kaza. Directed by: Walerian Borowczyk.