Flesh for the Beast

Gore Hounds will love this movie. There is more gore in the first two minutes than almost all of the "video nasties" I have seen to date.

A group moves into the house to search for evidence of paranormal activity - or maybe something more.

It does get funny at times when four zombies, including scream queen Zoe Moonshine, appear when one of the ghost hunters is stealing some jewelry.

But, it was Ketchum (Jim Coope) who got to meet the first succubi - in the flesh - and enjoy some hot sex before he was dispatched rather gruesomely.

Oh, what a fantasy! The young girl with her toys is met by another member. Unfortunately, he must have ate something wrong for dinner as he manages to vomit his entire insides. Didn't Fulci do that in some movie? The real reason this group has been hired is becoming apparent, and it all is in the hands, or visions, of Erin (Jennifer Litsch). It is in one of those visions that scream queen Caroline Munro appears.

We do get to see Litsch in full bloom as one of the succubi takes her form to dispatch quick draw Monks (David Runco). Then all the succubi (Caroline Hoermann, Ruby Larocca, and Barbara Joyce) dance around and chow down. Yum.

There is plenty here for those who love FX, blood and gore and lots of full frontal.

A great ending to a story that puts writer/director West in the giallo camp for sure.

The film is not anything special. The film is padded out with a lot of nudity and gore and sometimes gory nudity.However there is something magical about watching three naked women batting around a dismembered corpse to a Buckethead solo. The soundtrack is definitely the best thing about this movie.

So overall you might as well skip this one unless you are a big fan of Buckethead's music and bad movies. The gore is OK but not amazing and the movie repeats itself a lot. Also it is quite obvious that the director normally directs soft-core porn films by the fact has people running around naked rather than an actual story.

With so many lame, low-budget horror DVDs misleading fans through the use of salacious cover-art, carefully selected stills, and provocative blurb, it's nice to find one that finally makes good on its packaging's promise of copious amounts of sex and violence.

Flesh for the Beast is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination—the story is clichéd nonsense, the acting is average at best (even from its two 'names', Caroline Munro and Aldo Sambrell), and the direction is uninspired—but it does feature enough gratuitous full-frontal female nudity and gruesome gore to satisfy most depraved viewers' lust for flesh, whether it be for the pink and supple kind, or the ragged, red and bloody variety.

As in Armand Weston's The Nesting (1981), Roberta Findlay's Blood Sisters (1987) and Lucio Fulci's The Ghosts of Sodom (1988), writer/director Terry West's Flesh for the Beast is set in a building that used to be a brothel, and which is now the centre of terrifying paranormal activity. The owner of the building, John Stoker (Sergio Jones) hires a team of parapsychologists to try and cleanse the property, but one-by-one the visitors are seduced and killed by the evil succubi that dwell there.

This rather cheesy set-up might not be that original, but it does allow for plenty of sleazy shenanigans, with the demons first appearing as randy young women in order to shag their intended victims, before eventually turning nasty and yanking out their internal organs and generally making a lot of mess: during the course of the film, Jones is absolutely drenched in the red stuff, one guy pukes up his guts (literally), the naked ladies playing the succubi writhe enthusiastically in a pool of blood and assorted organs, and even Caroline Munro joins in the bloody fun, having her throat cut at the end of her one brief scene.

Having seen a ton of low-budget horror way worse than Flesh for the Beast, I am genuinely surprised by the mostly disparaging comments here on IMDb. Don't people like honest-to-goodness sex and blood in their horror anymore?

A group of parapyschologists get a job in an haunted old mansion. Media Blasters released this in R-rated & unrated versions. I choose to get the unrated version, naturally. When Media Blasters first annouced they planned to produce original movies, I was hopeful, as Media Blasters,while not my favorite distributer of Dvds (that would be Blue Underground), are still up there. To say I was let down is a bit of an understatement. This piece of cinematic waste was written & directed by Terry West, known for his soft-core parodies (ie. Spider-babe, Lord of the G-strings, etc..). This movie reminded me of his soft-core flicks, not for it's sex scenes (those are laughably bad in this one), but for the insanely lousy acting. Horror fans deserve SO MUCH better. On a bright note, the girl who plays Erin is a vegetarian, luckily for her her role (and this film) has NO meat to it whatsoever.

My Grade: D-

Dvd Extras: Behind the scenes; Interviews with Caroline Hoermann and Aldo Sambrell (with his past, he deserved much better then this movie, in my opinion); Teaser trailer; stills gallery; Trailers for "the Virgin of Nuremberg" (with no sound), "Zombi 2", "Faceless", and "Blood Feast 2"

Eye candy: pretty much all the actresses get fully nude at some point.

Easter Egg: Highlight the Teaser in the extras menu, then press left for a live clip of the band "Buckethead"

This movie was absolutely terrible. I am sometimes quite shocked that such ideas receive funding and actually make it to video. After watching the movie, it's actually quite hilarious listening to the director and producer wax philosophic about the degree of professionalism and quality they were attempting to achieve (but didn't). An especially funny moment (in the behind the scenes) was the producer describing how they spent literally months crafting the story and putting it together when one gets quite the opposite impression after viewing it.

I rarely rail on movies with such frankness, but this one almost angered me for wasting my time with such a poor effort. It only goes to show that it is not the paintbrush which makes a man a painter, but the images he creates.