The Beast Within (1982) – Review

Some horror plots are just unavoidably grim. It comes with the territory, really; but every now and then, you settle down in front of a movie to find that it’s downbeat tone goes far beyond just the typical slaughtering of teens and the odd cheap jump scare. Such a film is The Beast Within, a seemingly typical monster movie that immediately subverts expectations by making beastly sexual assault a major part of the plot. As distasteful as that may seem (and it is fairly distasteful), it’s pretty much what you’d expect from director Philippe Mora, who is mostly famous for spectacularly tanking the Howling franchise thanks to the infamous overexposure of Sybil Danning’s boobs. And yet, considering that this was a filmmaker who went on to give us marsupial werewolves in Howling III, there’s something bizarrely pure about how uncomfortable The Beast Within makes us, even when the plot goes full, fucking bugnuts. Literally.

On a rural Mississipi backroad back in 1964, Caroline and Eli McCleary get stranded when their car craps out on them, but as Eli trudges up the road to procure the services of a tow truck, a snarling, inhuman beast breaks free of the basement it’s being chained in and ends up raping Caroline and leaving her in the mud.
Seventeen years later, we find that not only have the McCleary’s managed to move on from their hideous ordeal, but Caroline had become pregnant from her assault and both Eli and her have raised the baby as their own. However, young Michael has recently become incredibly ill and in an attempt to discover if his sickness is genetic, the family have returned to the scene of the boy’s horrible conception in order to discover who the father might have been. As awkward as this may be for virtually everyone involved, the McClearys soon grow suspicious that certain key members of the town, are trying to pull some kind of hush job over the whole sordid affair. Finding Sheriff Bill Poole and Doc Schoonmaker sympathetic to their plight, we discover that Caroline’s attack lines up with the murder of Lionel Curwin, a mortician who was found partially eaten – and it undoubtedly has something to do with Judge Curwin and newspaper editor, Edwin Curwin who desperately wants the McClearys to halt their investigation ASAP.
But while all this is going on, young Michael is seemingly being put through the genetic wringer as his sickness soon shifts to outright body horror as he starts speaking in the voice of someone named Billy Connors and settling some seventeen year old scores this man apparently had. Is this a “simple” case of possession, or has something more bizarre occurred? Why are more cannibalised bodies showing up of people who had beef with this Connors and what does the sounds of chirping cicadas have to do with anything? It seems that blood is thicker than water, an Michael’s true parentage is about to have some grisly effects on all involved.

So to address the 500lb cicada in the room, despite its dead serious tone and fairly distasteful story content, The Beast Within is basically crazier than a shithouse rat and all the better for it. Essentially taking the basic themes of Hammer’s Curse Of The Werewolf that similarly made a tenuous connection to a child of sexual assault be a conduit for monstrous behaviour, Mora then upgrades it by adding the production values of another lycanthrope flick – An American Werewolf In London – in order to provide some bladder-riffic transformation effects. The result is something of a bizarre, needlessly complex monster mash that seems to be positively rejoicing in how sleezy it all feels, but you’ll be hard pushed to find much like it.
One of the most noticeable aspects about the film is how Mora has managed to snag himself a fairly respectable cast for a movie ostensibly centred around a rape monster. Robocop’s Ronny Cox is there, as is Star Trek II’s Bibi Besch, The Mask Of Zorro’s L.Q. Jones and even Predator’s R.G. Armstrong (who for the latter parts of the movie looks like Colonel Sanders with a head wound) and each of them treat an admittedly ridiculous story with all the seriousness of a heart attack. The flick even attempts to whip up a sense of tragedy around Paul Clemens’ Michael as his body proceeds to undergo changes far more brutal than a dash of puberty while trying to start a budding, doomed romance with a local girl. Despite fate telling them to back off when her dog discovers a severed arm during a make out session, the two obviously continue leading to something of an amusingly strange backstory to unfurl.

To put things plainly, The Beast Within contains one of the most confounding, brow wrinkling, whacked out creatures in all of monsterdom that basic takes the vague characteristics of a Werewolf and hands it over to the humble, insectoid feelers of the cicada. That’s right, the bug. So not only is the film kicked off with the woman who played the mother of Captain Kirk’s child being sexually assaulted by a were-cicada, but her son, Michael starts exhibiting similar changes too. Beyond that, due to the original creature’s funky cicada-powers (!), it’s managed to transfer its human consciousness into Michael’s essence from conception, meaning that his personality is in danger of being overridden whenever the Bill Connors part of him wants payback on the townsfolk that wronged him. How has this ludicrous creature come into being? Well, I’ll leave the explaining for the film to do, but regardless of how you deal with the outrageous notion of how a man becomes part cicada, it does give the movie the excuse to ladle on some impressively unsubtle transformation effects that go out of their way to remind just how good American Werewolf and The Howling’s truly are. It’s not that The Beast Within has especially bad effects – the bladder effects are nice and tactile even if Michael’s entire head inflates like a balloon at one point – it’s that it not only feels slightly similar to a scene from Amityville II, but the way it’s shot doesn’t have the artistry that John Landis or Joe Dante displayed when they made horror history.
Needless to say, after Michael’s alternated between a possessed murderer and a seventeen year-old who just wants to snog with the pretty blonde enough times and his inner cicada makes its presence felt, we’re nicely on course for a predictably grim ending – what, you thought a movie about a sexually active cicada monster was going to have a happy ending?

There’s been a long and uneasy history of monsters forcing themselves on women in horror culture that include Humanoids Of The Deep, Breeders, Galaxy Of Terror and around 20% of everything pulp author Richard Laymon ever wrote, so you can imagine how grotty this sub-genre is when I say that The Beast Within is somehow one of the classier entries. However, as grim as it gets, the movie attempts to tell such an outrageous story with such a straight face, it’s tough not to feel admiration (and a slight amount of pity) for all involved. Is it distasteful, disturbing and uncomfortable – yes, but then it’s supposed to be.
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