Dorathen Better Late Then Never

TeenzTen An action-packed slog

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Michael_Elliott The Beast (1975)** (out of 4) Lucy (Lisbeth Hummel) comes from a wealthy family and she has agreed to marry MathuriN (Pierre Benedetti) a man whose once proud family finds themselves at a low point. Soon a variety of sexual perversions come to light when the young lady visits the man before their wedding.Walerian Borowczyk's work has always been quite controversial and it strike a certain core among film buffs. Some see THE BEAST as a masterpiece while others just see it as a perverted piece of trash trying to pass itself off as an art movie. The first time I watched this movie I hated it with a very strong passion. I honestly thought it was nothing more that a cheap porno with a very dark and rather ugly bit of perversion.I wouldn't say my feelings changed too much with the second viewing but at the same time I did enjoy the film much more and I think it's because I accepted the fact that it was a rather stupid film with a certain black humor. I mean, the final thirty-minutes is pure perversion and features all sorts of scenes where the Beast "gets off" on a woman he has captured in the woods. These pornographic sex scenes are just so laughable and unlike anything you've seen before that you can't help but get some mild entertainment out of them. Of course, these scenes will have many hitting the eject button but I guess you could argue that any sort of reaction is a good thing.The performances for the most part are good but there's no question that it's the bizarre atmosphere created by Borowczyk that people are going to talk about. I think the film is way too slow and way too long for its own good to e a complete success. The first portion of the film drags on for no reason and scenes involving the horse porn is here for no other reason than to shock. THE BEAST is unlike any other film you've seen, that's for sure, and that's the one thing that keeps it somewhat watchable.

foreverDSY Wow. Uhm...well...wow! I guess I'll start with the plot. A betrothed woman (Lucy) arrives at the family home of her would be husband (Mathurin) in France, where they are awaiting the arrival of the Bishop or Cardinal or someone in the Catholic Church to marry them (to satisfy a will.) While waiting, young Lucy learns about a legend of a Beast who roamed the grounds centuries before. In bed that night, she begins fantasizing about the Beast and his rape-turned-consensual tryst with the former lady of the house. That's where it gets interesting! The plot is really pretty thin (and it seems to drag on for quite a while in the middle of the flick), but the filmmaker rewards (?) those who stick it out with a shocking and hilarious finale.This movie isn't for everyone. If you're looking for great cinema, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a far-out movie about bestiality (that almost casts a sympathetic glance over the subject) this movie is for you! (If you have a weak stomach, don't be afraid of this one. Outside of some horse-on-horse action at the beginning, the 'deeds' are pretty cartoonish, IMO)

KittyGrimm Perhaps it's me and my perverted ways, or the fact that I tend to have a very sick mind, but I rented this film at random one very weird night and to my great surprise, I enjoyed it. Yes, I read the synopsis on the back of the DVD box and read that it had been banned for 25 years and figured I was prepared for anything it would offer. I was clearly deceived after seeing...well...everything, to cut a long story short. I can see why it was banned, not only for such explicit sex scenes, but for beastiality. Of course, as it is freely based on the classic fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, a personal favorite of mine, it tells the story of a girl's sexual awakening over a dream about a duchess being chased by a whatever-the-hell-that-thing-was-like beast with an enormous erection and a substantial amount of ejaculation. Of course, the beast gets what he wants and the duchess decides she likes it and they continue frolicking in the woods. But that's not all. Oh, there is so much more! Not only do we get to see interspecial sex, but there's also humping horses, the babysitter who gets down and dirty with the slave when she's not humping the bed to get her...er...satisfaction and the daydreaming girl masturbating with rose petals. Creative and enjoyable, but it did take a while for my father to talk to me again after he watched it after I went to bed...I was 15. Words of advice when watching this film: make sure you're the only one who knows you have it and watch it with the curtains closed. It may be fun, but I doubt there are other porn films like this one.

Graham Greene La Bête is one of those 70's European "art-films" that you hear people discussing on culture programmes and on the Internet, without ever really believing that it actually got made. I first came across it during a Film Four extreme season... the film being preceded by the obligatory Mark Kermode introduction, in which he talked about the shocking and confrontational imagery and the supposed artistic merits, before waxing lyrical on the history of the film's director, Walerian Borowczyk. Having already seen a number of the confrontational relics to the original "new European extreme" I wasn't expecting anything truly shocking... however, when a film opens on an image of a horse's moist, erect privates, you have to read just yours senses slightly.The film, as an artistic statement thirty-years on, is no masterpiece. In fact, it's quite poor to be honest. But Kermode's assessment, that this is a film like no other, is absolutely true. As he had done with his previous film, the soft-core erotica of the Immoral Tales, Borowczyk seems to be intent on pushing the audience's buttons (no real problem with that). As you would expect from a film that tows the line between the art-house and the grind-house, the film presents shocking scenes of intimacy and, indeed, faux-bestiality, wrapped up in a sleek pretentious veneer that seems to be aiming for the style of Burtolucci's early masterpiece, The Conformist.As well as the images of animal-intimacy, the film also throws in issues of pregnancy, rape, the class divide (master and servants, and all that) and inter-racial lust. It's all empty provocation of course, with Borowczyk unable (or unwilling) to tie any of this into some kind of message or theme, instead falling back on over-the-top sex-scenes and cringe-worthy prosthetics. In comparison to other controversial and confrontational statements of the same era- particularly films like In the Realm of the Senses and Pasolini's Salo - it's a bit of a one-note (or one-joke) film... sure, it's original, but it's empty too, and often quite dull. It's also not as beautiful (in the photographic sense) as some viewers have noted, with the overall look and design of the film paling in comparison to films like The Canterbury Tales, Barry Lyndon, 1900, Godard's Weekend, the above-mentioned In the Realm of the Senses and even moments of Borowczyk's own Immoral Tales (...and that's not counting the hundreds of even more beautiful films made before or since).Thus, La Bête seems a little out of place... too pretentious to be taken seriously as a piece of exploitation, and too slight and unintelligent to appeal to the chin-stroking intellectuals. It's never clear whom the film is supposed to be aimed at... with La Bête only really offering any interest to the viewer in a curious "car-crash" sense. Still, a lot of people seem to like it, perhaps because of the negative stigma often attached to viewers who don't seem to grasp these supposedly deep works of Euro-genius (or perhaps they just like the film)? At any rate, I don't want to be the person to crap all over a much-loved film, but for me, La Bête was just a tired and tiresome throwback to the days of the sleazy 70's... which is, in light of similarly minded films of the same era, really quite poor.