Wonderfully offbeat film!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Director Philippe Mora has made some distinctively ropey films throughout his massive 49 year career (he's still making movies), but The Beast Within, a film you could easily mistake as a werewolf picture, is certainly one of his best. Loosely based on Edward Levy's novel, Beast is a slow-burner, but nevertheless features some satisfying scenes of gory horror, and one mutation scene that is still pretty impressive today. But there's no werewolves here; the 'beast' of the title is somehow a cicada, something that, due to studio butchering (when will they learn?), remains unexplained and confusing, putting a bit of a downer on what is a perfectly passable 80's horror.The movie begins with happily married couple Eli (80's rent-a-b*****d Ronny Cox) and Caroline MacCleary (Bibi Besch) breaking down near a small town in Mississippi. As Eli wanders off to search for help, Caroline is attacked and raped by a beast lurking in the woods. 17 years later, and Michael MacLeary (Paul Clemens) is the result of that rape, and is in hospital dying from a strange condition that has left the doctor's baffled. Desperate for answers, Eli and Caroline return Nioba, the town in which the incident occurred, only to find secretive townsfolk and a possible cover-up. Michael escapes hospital and, apparently driven by an external influence, murders and cannibalises Edwin Curwin (Logan Ramsey), a man possibly involved in what happened 17 years previously.It will hardly give the likes of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and Sam Raimi sleepless nights, but Beast is very well-made, with care taken to develop an intriguing plot and a creepy atmosphere. It's all anchored by an impressive performance from Clemens (whatever happened to him?), who spends most of the film looking as if he's about to explode. The change scene is hardly on par with An American Werewolf in London (1981), but it's a very good scene, and when Michael's head swells up to the size of a medicine ball, it becomes inadvertently funny in a what- the-f**k kind of way. When the 'revelations' come, it will leave you scratching your head, but it does not ruin what is a well-directed, character-driven horror that features plenty to appease gore-hounds and casual viewers alike.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Eli and Caroline MacCleary are on their honeymoon driving through the middle of nowhere in Mississippi when their car gets a flat. Leaving his wife with the car, Eli hikes off to find a tow truck. While he's gone, a mysterious creature attacks and rapes Caroline. Upon returning, Eli rushes his wife to the hospital. Seventeen years pass. Caroline bore her rapist's child and she and Eli have raised the boy, Michael, as their own. But now Michael is suffering some inexplicable health problems his doctor can't explain. Whatever it is he's got, it's genetic.Eli and Caroline decide that their only hope for a cure is to find Michael's biological father: Caroline's rapist. They head back to the town where she was raped and begin asking around about violent crime. All they can find is a newspaper clipping about the notorious Lionel Curwin's house burning down. Nearly everyone in town is related to Lionel, and all of them are rude and openly hostile to the couple.The only person who is at all nice to them is Sheriff Bill Pool, who isn't related to the Curwins. He explains that Lionel was a very unpleasant man who had a rocky relationship with another local, Billy Connors, who disappeared.Meanwhile, Michael escapes from his hometown hospital and on some impulse drives to the town where he kills and partially eats the Curwin who runs the local paper. He is found and his parents take him to the local doctor, Dr. Schoonmaker, who pronounces that Michael has somehow gotten better! Or so it seems. Something is growing inside of Michael, something that hates the entire Curwin family and wants to destroy them.The Beast Within is an excellent little horror film, based on a novel by Edward Levy. The plot, involving a pregnancy with a monstrous origin resulting in a seemingly normal but still unusual child, and the small town conspiracy to keep the crimes of the Curwin family a secret are all quite Lovecraftian in nature.On a note of parenthood, I liked how Eli accepts Michael as his son even though he isn't. I expected him to despise Michael and see him as living evidence of his wife's rape. Instead, Eli loves Michael and is willing to do whatever it takes to try and find out what is happening to him. Caroline likewise loves Michael dearly despite how he was conceived.The cast is amazing. Ronny Cox as Eli is warm and appropriately fatherly. Bibi Besch as Caroline is also quite good, playing a very strong woman who doesn't let her traumatic rape haunt her. Special mention should also go to L.Q. Jones as the helpful and sympathetic Sheriff Pool, and especially R.G. Armstrong, who delivers an excellent performance as the kind and gentle Dr. Schoonmaker.Really, the only dud in the cast is Paul Clemens as Michael. He's just bland and has little to do except growl and snarl. The script is partially to blame here, as we don't get a chance to know Michael at all. The first time we meet him, he's lying in a hospital bed. This is not a good way to introduce your protagonist if you expect the audience to care about him! Despite this, The Beast Within succeeds and is very interesting. And no review would be complete without mentioning the special effects. When what is happening to Michael reaches its zenith, he undergoes a horrifying transformation that is definitely the highlight of the proceedings.

The changing into a monster of a young man is used as a metaphor for boys growing into men. The body goes through changes and urges become more primal. Suddenly playing center field for your baseball team is less alluring than chasing skirts. THE BEAST WITHIN perfectly captures this sentiment.The film focuses on teenage Michael (Paul Clemens) who has an illness that the doctors can't identify. It seems that young Michael is changing into a beast--one that resembles a humanoid creature that sexually assaulted his mother seventeen years ago. His parents, played by Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch, try to learn more about what happened seventeen years ago and venture to the town where she was raped by the monster: a sleepy, backwoods Mississippi community. They leave Michael at the hospital but he breaks out and some urge lures him to the small town his parents are visiting.While in this small Mississippi hamlet, Michael begins to succumb to urges: eating flesh and chasing the local hotty (Kitty Moffat). But these urges aren't your normal teenage male pursuits and Michael fears for Amanda's (Moffat) safety when he learns that members of her family are being targeted by a serial killer--the beast within.STORY: $$$ (The story is quite interesting. We get a nice little isolated setting with eccentric hillbilly characters who all seem to harbor a dark secret. Cox and Besch as the concerned parents try their hardest to uncover the secrets so they can save their child. The script builds enough suspense to sustain interest but the falling down of females in the woods seems a bit foolish. Bibi runs into a tree and Kitty looses her bearings too easily).ACTING: $$$$ (A helluva lot better than you see in the usual B-Rate film. Clemens is terrific as young Michael. His scenes where his body changes are brilliant displays of acting. He masterfully portrays agony. L.Q. Jones shines as the town sheriff, Mike's parents only real ally in the backwoods community. The underrated Ronny Cox is great as Mike's dad. He knows that Michael isn't his son but still shows him the amount of love he'd show a boy direct from his loins. Don Gordon and John Dennis Johnston are effectively slimy as backwoods villains and Kitty Moffat is solid in the role of Michael's forbidden fruit. But the best piece of acting belongs to Bibi Besch. There's little for her to do in the script but Bibi gets more out of this character than most actresses could extract. There's a scene, in which Miss Besch has no dialogue, where she learns that her son is becoming something akin to the monster that raped her years ago. Bibi exhibits such raw emotion in the scene that you, the viewer, know exactly what is going through her mind without her having to say a word. Give Bibi a standing ovation).NUDITY: $$$ (What would be a movie about teen lust without a little titillation? Bibi is stripped bare in the woods by a monster at the beginning of the film while Kitty Moffat suffers the same treatment at the close of the film. Creepy morgue attendant Luke Askew also spends some time ogling a buxom dead body in his morgue).

THE BEAST WITHIN is a decent horror film. While not a bad film like the Leonard Maltin guide would suggest, it does suffer from a script that certainly needed a re-write.The film begins with a couple on their honeymoon. Their car becomes stuck and while the husband goes for help, the wife is raped by a "thing". It's humanoid but it's also hard to tell exactly what it was in this rather graphic and bloody scene. The woman is soon discovered by the husband and she is still alive.The film now takes up 17 years later. The couple have since had a teenage son who is in the hospital with some odd malady. He's apparently dying and the hospital has no idea what's happening to him. The couple wonder if perhaps their teen is not actually the husband's progeny but that of the monster-like thing that raped the wife those many years ago. So, they leave the kid in the hospital and make their way to the small Texas town where she was violated. However, instead of finding answers, many of the townspeople feign ignorance--saying they know nothing of the rape or any other violent crimes. However, the wife is able to uncover evidence that they are lying.Fortunately, the sheriff takes their inquiry more seriously. That's because after their son miraculously 'recovered' and joined his parents in Texas, a human hand was discovered in the swamp. Something obviously violent and evil is afoot (or should that be 'ahand'?). Many skeletons are unearthed once the police team arrives and it seems that the bodies were perhaps already dead bodies that were stolen from the undertaker.At the same time, townspeople start dying one by one and in very, very violent ways. Oddly, they are all from the same family as well as their friends and it seems someone wants to exact revenge on them in particular. After a while, the evidence seems to point to the teen, though they wonder how could this sweet boy be behind the grisly murders. When it's apparent that the boy is the reincarnation of 'Bobby' (who somehow was implanted in the mother by Bobby when she was raped), all hell breaks loose.Now at this point in the film, the film is pretty exciting and cool. The idea of an evil person or being that is able to rape a woman in order to come back years later to exact revenge is certainly novel. In addition, the murders and the acting were all pretty good. However, when the boy starts to morph into some monster, the film stops making any sense at all and the transformation seems unnecessary and even cheesy. This just didn't work and took a good film and turned it into a goofy film towards the end--sort of like merging this film with THE EVIL DEAD! It's a shame, too, as the film was really engaging up until the goofy metamorphosis.By the way, there are two rather graphic rape scenes and this is certainly NOT a film for kids. I have heard that this film is a popular film on late night TV and with the rape scenes edited down, it's a much more family-friendly film.