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Newlyweds Caroline and Eli (Bibi Besch and Ronny Cox, respectively) suffer a car breakdown on the side of the road in fuckdick Mississippi. Eli goes to get help, while Caroline waits by the car and gets raped by a monster. Years later, their teenage son Michael (Paul Clemens) starts having a bunch of weird seemingly genetic health problems, so they go back to fuckdick Mississippi to see if they can find out who the rapist was. The townsfolk are super unhelpful and Michael's symptoms get more and more bizarre as he falls prey to... the beast within.
- Dog slaughter almost immediately out of the gate (-1)
- The next time somebody complains that modern horror movies are too visually dark, I'm going to make them watch this movie because I couldn't see fuck all (-1)
- The rape scene in this movie is paradoxically cartoonishly explicit and important to the plot, and also weirdly casual. I guess I forgot how blase 70s and 80s horror movies were about rape (-1)
- Michael's problems stem, according to his doctor, from overactivity of the pituitary gland, the most maligned gland in all of horror. Did people not know what the pituitary gland did back then? (-1)
- Michael's doctor do a whole bunch of genetic testing trying to figure out what's wrong with him and don't uncover that his dad isn't actually his dad (-1)
- Which brings up yet another reason rapists need to get charged and prosecuted - in case they impregnate somebody and years later the bastard spawn has some kind of genetic health problem (-1)
- There's lots of blood and stuff. There's also a part where the monster busts through a wall and rips buddy's head off which is fucking cool (+2)
- Paul Clemens' acting is particularly bad. Not that he had a lot to work with, but still (-1)
- There's a scene where Michael is making out with his girlfriend Amanda (Katherine Moffatt) and her dog comes over with a severed hand, interrupting their sexy time (+1)
- I wasn't totally paying attention but somehow Michael has the genetic memories of his biological father, which is stupid (-1)
- He might also be a demon, I don't know (-1)
- The town mortician (Luke Askew) checks out a female cadaver at one point (-1)
- He then gets embalmed alive which is fucking hardcore (+1)
- Michael shows up in Amanda's room, so her dad (John Dennis Johnston) just casually slaps the shit out of her (-1)
- The transformation effects, when Michael turns into... some kind of thing, are tight and the only really good thing about this movie (+1)
- He looks like some kind of weird-ass fly boy? Like Brundlefly junior? (+1)
- When he reaches his final form he actually looks pretty stupid tho (-1)
- Ultimately, the reasons that any of the plot happened don't make any sense. I'll explain it as concisely as possible: some weird local guy wouldn't fuck his wife, and then when she fucked this other dude, he killed her and imprisoned the dude in his basement, feeding him human flesh from the local morgue. Being fed flesh turned the dude into a monster, and he broke out of the basement, raped Caroline, and then died. Michael then comes and starts killing everybody related to the guy for revenge. But,
- Why did the monster dude rape Caroline instead of eating her? (-1)
- How did he gain the power to possess his son? I can almost accept eating human flesh turning him into a weird monster, but not a crazy ghost (-1)
- Michael wasn't locked in a basement and force fed dead bodies, but turned into a weird monster anyway (-1)
- There's also this thing where Michael hears cicadas right before he gets possessed by crazy demon monster ghost rapist dude. I wasn't paying attention if and when they explained this, but using my awesome powers of deduction I concluded it has something to do with the 17 year life cycle of some cicadas in the genus Magicicada (yes, that's the real name for them), and the reason he underwent a monstrous transformation was because these cicadas too undergo metamorphosis before sexual maturity. That's a pretty cool idea for a movie monster, and has exactly nothing to do with anything else in the movie (-1)
- Michael gets killed by his own mom in the end, which is intense (+1)
Final Score: -9
The Beast Within had a couple of good ideas but also a lot of really bad ideas, and takes itself way too seriously to be entertaining