THE BEAST (LA BETE)

Special to PollyStaffle.com

Here’s some super freak shit pulled out of the film archives by Cult Epics for you. I kid you not, this film begins with clearly authentic footage of horses fucking. The Beast (directed by Walerian Borowczyk) is a very odd erotica from Europe in the 70s, with an ending that left me scratching my head and shrugging my shoulders, but nonetheless a film worth examining, discussing and reviewing here.

That’s really not true of a lot of films. Why? Because many people who call themselves artists are full of shit. Gasp! You don’t say! There are three basic kinds of bad films that seem to dominate: art films that are too dull to watch (My Dinner with Andre), un-funny Hollywood comedies (Three Men and a Baby, Look Who’s Talking) and independent horror films that few see and no one cares about (Purple Glow). These reviews on the Wacky World of William Wheaton tend to be idiosyncratic pieces of horror or pornographic filmmaking from bygone eras. You can’t go too wrong with that, in a way. I’m thinking back right now when I was a student in New York, in I think, early 1997 to the first time as a freshman at Eugene Lang college when I went to my first loft party in Williamsburg. There are two albums I recall playing at that party - one was DJ Spooky’s Songs for a Dead Dreamer and the other was the soundtrack from Franco’s Vampyre Lesbos from the 70s which had just been reissued and was gaining a cult following. That soundtrack album I remember very clearly that even though that was older music, it felt very sharp and very new. It can work fairly well to grab things out of older periods of low budget filmmaking and resurrect them. The Beast is weird enough and obscure enough that it can work as that.

The film is best known for a whacked out sex scene involving a woman and a man in a monster costume with a huge penis that shoots a whole lot of semen everywhere. Loosely the film is based on the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast.” The plotline revolves around a kind of arranged marriage between a wealthy American woman and the son in a French nobility family. The bride shows up with her aunt to the French mansion that is filled with books on the occult and paintings with secret pictures of people copulating with animals on the back. There’s a myth hanging around about the castle being haunted by a beast. Gasp! It is!

The lead actress is hot, however, the director’s sexual tastes are likely to be alien or repulsive to many audiences. The climax of the film is a flash back sequence or dream sequence where the Enlightenment-era woman of the house with wig and corset getting chased through the forest by this monster that keeps shooting a whole lot of semen out of its penis. It looks like this is taking place in the dreams or fantasies of the present day bride to be who masturbates with a rose. There’s also a little thing you might catch in the film where one of the priests in the film is a little too affectionate with the little boy he has with him. The monster rapes the woman in the corset, but then she gets turned on in the course of being raped. It’s some rape-victim-submits-to-pleasure type fantasy. That and the opening scene with the horses qualify the film as being edgy and perverted.

The end leaves a lot unclear. The groom character dies, and the bride and her aunt find that he has a claw for one hand and a tail, suggesting that either he is the beast or that he is half beast and the bloodline of the house is sired by the beast. The bride does not stick around to find out. It ends with a priest commenting on the biblical restrictions against the sin of bestiality. It’s that whole deal you always get with the erotica genre and the whole question of prohibition and transgression of prohibition, the whole forbidden lust trip.

I would say The Beast is a decent film. There’s a bunch of pornography/erotica from the 70s based on surprising themes that I plan to get into writing about here, such as the 70s porn version of Alice in Wonderland. I recently wrote about Let My Puppets Come - a 70s porn that used strange puppets that look a lot like Jim Henson’s Muppets. Things like that are good for both shock value and camp or ironic comedic value, whether or not its intentional humor. I think it’s fair to say that this film is in that category. I’m pretty impressed that Borowczyk went ahead with using the horse mating footage. I’m a hard man to shock, being a huge fan of gun magazines, the one real private investigator trade publication, and right wing blogs. However, even I have to admit the tenacity and boldness of such a move on the director’s part. The juxtaposition of that and rape fantasy element in the same film is what makes this film work. I would say most people would agree that that’s a fairly perverted psyche that produced the film. If a film’s genuinely fucked up like that then it isn’t boring, is it?

- William Wheaton, April 2010

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