Beast Within
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining pretty much had the market cornered on the killer horror movie concept of: What if (from a child’s point of view) you witnessed your very own father transform in front of you into a deranged, bloodthirsty monster fully capable of bringing harm upon both yourself and others? Not many films before or since were willing to touch upon that somewhat sacred family dynamic and how that would play out, but this 1982 release did manage to reverse the dynamic by asking: What if (from the point of view of one’s loving parents) you had to witness your very own son first suffering and then literally transforming into a possessed, bloodthirsty, inhuman monster whom was fully capable of doing harm onto both yourself and others? But whereas Kubrick was able to present the reasons for the transformation while still maintaining an air of oblique mystery, here director Philippe Mora fumbles the ball in terms of the execution of the explanation, asking us to swallow half baked ideas that don’t even come close to justifying the supernatural nature of the whole thing, preferring instead to wallow in some chicken fried Southern Gothic environment where the secrets held by certain white rednecks are better kept than those of The United States Government. As our stars, we get Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch (best known as Captain Kirk’s baby momma) as the distraught parents, but before they had become “blessed”, they had been newlyweds stranded on the side of a dark road somewhere in rural Mississippi thanks to a flat tire. When Cox (portrayed here as being a nice, decent guy who nonetheless possesses all of the qualities of a bona fide beta male) heads off to take the long walk to the next gas station to grab himself a tow truck, his wife gets out and starts wandering around with their dog, only to encounter a beastly, demonic creature who kills the dog and winds up raping the shit out of her, leaving her barely alive and naked so that the returning Cox can scrape her up off the ground. Fast forward 17 years and it turns out that their teenage son (Paul Clemens) is already in serious condition at the local hospital and making contorted faces as we learn that he has an “occult malignancy” that is making his entire metabolism change and shift at an alarming rate. Of course, the boy is really the result of the earlier rape at the hands of the monster all those years before which both parents are fully aware of but it seems that Cox has always been in serious denial of the fact that the kid is not his and never was. As the local yokel doctors remain stumped as to why what appears to be an average human teenage boy is suddenly evolving into another kind of physical being, Cox finally owns up to the fact that the creature who raped his wife must be the answer and so the two head back to that same small town to investigate and find out if anyone else has ever known about the existence of this creature. What they do find is a veritable feast of character acting royalty including the town sheriff (L.Q. Jones), the town doctor (R.G. Armstrong), the town judge (Don Gordon), the town newspaper editor (Logan Ramsey) and the town undertaker (Luke Askew). What they also find out (much to their shock and surprise) is that on the VERY SAME NIGHT that the wife was attacked and raped, one of the other town citizens had been found torn apart along with his house having been burned to the ground. It isn’t long before the teenage son sneaks out of the hospital where he was being kept and makes his way to the same small hick town, alternating between being kept under the doctor’s care and then sneaking out mostly because he has developed an infatuation on a sweet, blonde, baby girl teenager (Kitty Moffat) while his parents take a side with the “good” townsfolk (Jones, Armstrong) who also want to get to the bottom of things against the “bad” townsfolk (Gordon, Ramsey, Askew) who are hiding all of the secrets of both how and why the monster even exists in the first place. Without giving too much away, it’s obvious that the son is transforming into his (now dead) father, but the reasons given for both the monster’s superhuman strength and abilities as well as in the way that the son seems to not only have some sort of telepathic link to his dead monster father’s thought processes, but essentially knows everything about the gruesome things which he needs to do since obviously his monster father had died leaving much unfinished business in the town with the son at times even assuming his identity and talking in his voice. This would suggest that not only is the boy literally possessed, but that the creature who was his father is just so monstrously powerful that he can actually communicate from beyond the grave and even come back from the dead. The problem is when we get the explanation for these superhuman and supernatural tendencies. Again, without giving too much away, we are told that the monster father was once a handsome, normal young man who had pissed off the wrong person and had been chained down in a fruit cellar, left to practically starve to death until his captor had made a habit of throwing dead bodies into the fruit cellar for him to feast on, turning him into a cannibal pretty much by necessity but throughout all of this the reasoning as to why (understanding of course that the whole ordeal would definitely make him as nutty as a fruitcake) he would undergo a literal physical and metabolic change that would even render him impervious to bullets (notwithstanding a head shot at close range) along with the ability in passing on his bloodline to enact telepathic possession upon his offstring is never sufficiently explained even while watching country doctors who are treating and witnessing firsthand possibly the next stage in human evolution (or maybe human regression as it would be) is as amusing as it gets in the world of The Old South. So this results in a story that sees the teenage son go back and forth between being in his parents’ loving arms (even as Cox is brought along by the sheriff for the ensuing investigation at various crime scenes so often that he might as well be deputized) and then going into town to carry out the revenge killings that still need to be done usually in a brutal and savage manner, ripping out throats, tearing off heads and generally leaving the victims in a most unsavory state whenever they are found. The “small town conspiracy” angle which is meant to tie everything together and only gets revealed very slowly bit by bit over the course of the film is actually pretty lame (why the guilty parties would have ever even bothered to have kept the creature alive in the first place which directly caused him to have become so powerful is the biggest mystery of them all). As the son gets more and more used to killing (always appearing to be the picture of good health right after a fresh, gruesome kill only to become “sick” again because he needs to do it once more), his facial appearance (through subtle makeup effects) appears to change into something more bestial / demonic, but there is nothing subtle about the transformation at the end of the film, employing the same “hydraulic bladder” effects which Rick Baker practically invented for American Werewolf In London (winning an Oscar in the process), but as gory as most of the kills in this film are, this final showpiece FX sequence seems to be done more to show off just how this film could also utilize Baker’s techniques as well as he could without really projecting the horror and pain that the process could entail like Baker succeeded in doing (even though towards the end the son continuously tells anyone who will listen to kill him before it happens). Through it all, the film continues to get its emotional mileage from Cox and his wife refusing to give up on their beloved son and always thinking that somehow at the end of the day he will be miraculously cured which makes their witnessing of what’s happening to him complete with every last shred of hope being mercilessly stripped away the real horror on display here as opposed to any kind of Southern ancestral curse or in the concept of chained up starvation being used to create a monster. However, it’s not enough to redeem some bad acting (especially from Paul Clemens as the son) or what seemed at times to be a rushed production where the veteran cast may have just had to get it right on the first take unlike Kubrick who allowed performances to evolve over multiple takes as here we just get a gory monster movie and little more…
5/10