An American heiress travels to France with her mother to meet the man to whom she is betrothed, the son of an impoverished Marquis. Of course she doesn't seem to know that his family is impoverished, and the greedy Marquis is eager to have the wedding as quickly as possible so that he may save himself from destitution.
While the Marquis scrambles to ensure the wedding will occur, the Heiress discovers a legend of a horrible beast that supposedly stalks the forest nearby. It is even rumored that the former lady of the house once copulated with the strange creature. Soon she finds herself overcome by recurring dreams of the incident. What secrets will this bizarre tale reveal about the family into which she is supposed to marry.
The Beast taught me a valuable lesson. When scouring websites about obscure monster movies, don't assume that because something is on a list of best movies that it is actually any good, and always check IMDB before wasting an hour and a half of your life on something.
This is one of the only movies I have actually turned off within the first two minutes. Close up shots of horses having sex do not appeal to me. For a moment I thought that I had downloaded something else altogether and was about to delete it. Then I scanned ahead and found out that actually this was the movie. It got less disgusting, but not much better, from there. This is because The Beast is really only marginally a monster movie at all. In fact, we don't even seen the beast himself until an hour into the movie and when we do, he looks ridiculous. I mean, this thing looks like a giant rat bred with a bear and he spends the whole movie running around with a giant rubber phallus sticking out of him as he tries to find someone to bone. Even so, its almost a relief just to know there is actually a monster in this movie after the extremely boring and pointless hour of film that precedes him. I was starting to think the beast might be the pedophile priest, the violently greedy Marquis, or either the intensely obnoxious uncle or Marquis' son. But no, they were just ludicrous characters put there to flesh the movie out to a respectable length so that the director, Walerian Borowczyk, would have somewhere to put his monster-rape scene.
So that brings us to the part of the movie where something actually happens. That something is that the heiress dreams about the former lady of the house being chased through the woods by the beast, who eventually catches her. Naturally, she resists the advances of the big furry critter, but as with all misogynistic rape fantasies, she ends up liking it, then she ends up fucking him literally to death. At the end of the movie the cardinal, who has finally shown up to perform the marriage, explains in fairly icky detail his perspective on bestiality, why and how it happens, and why the beast died.
The only question remaining is... what the fuck? A little bit of artsy fartsy cinematography and some pretty scenery doesn't make up for the rest of whatever this is. Unless you enjoy being extraordinarily bored, or have some sick psychological issues that lead you to be sexually attracted to animals, then I recommend not viewing this bizarre, yet largely dull, and highly sexist film.
0.5 out of 5 giant rubber monster wangs
Unrated: contains nudity, sexual content, violence, language.
Watch The Beast trailer.
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