The Beast

Synopsis: Forced into marriage to ensure the financial stability of his dysfunctional family, Mathurin De L’Esperance (Pierre Benedetti) is to marry Lucy Broadhurst (Lisbeth Hummel). On the eve of their nuptials, as the families gather, Lucy is witness to some increasingly strange shenanigans as she discovers the diary of one of the Esperance family ancestor’s, Romilda. She begins to relive, in her mind, some of Romilda’s experiences as she reads her diary entries, dreaming of being ravaged by a beast in the woods, little knowing how these ancient stories will affect her life in the present.

It’s always a special moment when you get to see one of those films that have caused controversy. Walerian Borowczk’s The Beast is one such film. Banned in Australia for decades, shown only in private cinema clubs like the infamous Scala in the UK, the film’s reputation grew as it became more and more difficult to see without braving customs and ordering it from more liberal countries like Holland. Well now, as the shackles of film censorship have loosened, the film has become available to the masses on DVD. Was it worth the wait? Well to be honest, not really, I’m not sure what I expected but it was probably more than a stilted, poorly acted, period drama with a bit of monster sex thrown in for good measure.

The bestiality, when it comes (so to speak) is remarkably graphic. The hairy beast’s notably unrealistic fake phallus spurts fluids all over the place with an abandon rarely seen in underground cinema, let alone mainstream. The combination of beauty and the beast does jar though as the fiend at first forces itself on our heroine before she gradually begins to enjoy it. It’s a strange fusion of surreally unrealistic moments and nastily unpleasant ones. Anyone expecting to be titillated by this hybrid will be sorely disappointed. Even the straight sex is a weird concoction of masturbation with bed knobs and roses and interracial sex with a manservant.

The Beast is one of those films of which you wonder exactly who its intended audience is? The fact that it starts with some graphic moments of equine copulation will have most turning off but it’s only a cheap shot to shock and try and give the later scenes of animalistic sexuality more gravitas. Maybe not surprising as the film’s most infamous sequence was originally a short segment of Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales and was later expanded into this full-length feature so that it almost feels like two different films. His later film, Dr Jekyll And His Woman (1981) starring Udo Kier combined sensuality with horror in a much more satisfactory manner.

Too graphic for the mainstream and too boring for the rain coat brigade, on any level, The Beast just doesn’t work.

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