The Beast Within (1982)

Now here's a nasty little piece of work: in 1982, at the height of the "splatter" genre of monster / killer movies ushered in by the likes of Friday the 13th and Halloween (for better or worse), here came a film that not only featured murderers, monsters and Lovecraft-ian undercurrents, but also cicadas.

Don't know what a cicada is? Neither did I, until I Wikipedia'ed them:

A cicada (pronounced /sɪˈkeɪdə/ or pronounced /sɪˈkɑːdə/) is an insect of the order Hemiptera, suborder Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily Cicadoidea, with large eyes wide apart on the head and usually transparent, well-veined wings. There are about 2,500 species of cicada around the world, and many remain unclassified. Cicadas live in temperate to tropical climates where they are among the most widely recognized of all insects, mainly due to their large size and remarkable acoustic talents.

That explains that. Now remember that, as I explain just what, exactly, cicadas are doing in a horror movie like The Beast Within.

Here is what the writer of this calls The Plot: In the 1964 country back roads of Mississippi, newlyweds Eli (Ronny Cox) and Caroline (Bibi Besch) suffer a car breakdown and, as Eli tries to go and find help, Caroline is viciously attacked and raped by an unseen figure and gets pregnant.

Now a teenager, the boy Michael (Paul Clemens) is dying from an unknown disease which befuddles all the doctors who examine him. Caroline convinces an understanding Eli that they have to try to learn the identity of her attacker, and perhaps find out if something genetic about the rapist holds the key to Michael's illness.

Soon after arriving in the small town of Nioba, Mississippi, the couple discovers clues, hints, evasive townsfolk and outright stonewalling from the local judge (Don Gordon). Meanwhile, Michael sneaks out of the hospital he is in and instinctively goes to Nioba himself. Not long after this, dead bodies start turning up.

Up to this point, everything seems pretty straightforward for movies like this, doesn't it? It's not like there's anything out of the ordinary, outside of the attacking and raping and murder, right? And so it would have been, too, if not for this particular tagline that was slapped right there on the original posters for The Beast Within:

We dare you to watch the last 30 minutes of this film without screaming, covering your eyes, or running from your seat.

And why is that, you ask? Remember all that with the cicadas earlier? Well, it seems that the monster rapist who fathered Michael was also...well, was also...wait, no; how can this be? It's not like...

Okay, okay: the rapist was....

Uh...hold on a second, I'll be right back.

(gets out movie, watches again, comes back)

Guess I wasn't imagining it; the rapist was half-cicada.

Which makes Michael part-cicada, and also prone to one of the most prolonged transformation scenes ever committed to film that didn't involve stop-motion or Lon Chaney.

You see, the transformation effects, supervised by Thomas Burman - who also did effects and makeup on such latter-day classics as My Bloody Valentine, The Hand, Happy Birthday To Me, Halloween III, One Dark Night and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone - and by Fred Cramer - who worked on films like Taps, The Killing Fields and (God help us all) Inchon, and employed an interesting brace of effect called "bladder effects". This was achieved with air-filled condoms underneath all the makeup and latex facial coverings that were inflated so as to achieve a morphing effect. And if that sounds familiar, you must have seen The Howling (1981) around the same time. Well, it goes into overdrive in The Beast Within.

There are also many of the more-conventional effects one would expect in a movie like this, and brother, they are brutal with a capital "B": many beatings, cuttings, gougings, stabbings, shootings, biting out chunks of flesh and the ever-popular ripping off of heads takes place here and quite effectively, too. I guess "effective" is the right word to use when it comes to showing someone ripping someone else's head off of their shoulders.

This is directed by Philippe Mora, who also gave the world a great documentary (Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?), an interesting Dennis Hopper movie (Mad Dog Morgan), two Howling sequels (and some good looks at Sybil Danning's breasts, for which I am always grateful), and an intriguing alien abduction movie (Communion). He is creative, I'll give him that. And so is writer Tom Holland, a revered name now in fantasy and science fiction writing whose career took off in 1982 after writing this and the Vincent Van Patten ode to teen violence The Class of 1984. And would you believe this was not an original screenplay? That all this murdering and cicada-crossbreeding was all based on a book? Well, it was. I know; I'd never read it, either.

And those Lovecraft touches I mentioned earlier? Well, other than the main character being an horrific monster, there are two characters named Curwin and Dexter Ward. And anyone who is familiar with the work of H.P. Lovecraft knows where I'm going with that. So there you go.

What surprises me are the names attached to this. Not only Cox (who I still think did his best work under Paul Verhoeven) and Besch (with 1982 being her banner year with this and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan under her belt), but also esteemed cowboy actors R.G. Armstrong, Luke Askew and L.Q. Jones, character actor extraordinaire Logan Ramsey (who co-starred with even more-famous wife Anne "Throw Mama From The Train" Ramsey in Any Which Way You Can), the Mannequin movie series' favorite stereotyped actor Meshach Taylor, and John Dennis Johnston.

Yes, John Dennis Johnston. If you watched any movies at all in the Late Seventies/Early Eighties, you know who John Dennis Johnston is by the face alone. A face that belonged to Chopper from KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park, the testicle donor in Jekyll & Hyde...Together Again, the co-pilot from the Terror at 20,000 Feet segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, Pete the Mechanic in Streets of Fire and...for those whose minds don't go back that far, you'll recognize him from such TV series as "Walker: Texas Ranger" and "In Plain Sight". He's done a lot, 'nuff said.

As Michael, Paul Clemens does a sympathetic job as the tortured teen who harbors a deadly secret. I was surprised that not only had he worked before this (as early as 1974) and had a lot of success on several TV series, but his mom was Eleanor Parker! You know: from The Sound of Music, The Man With The Golden Arm, Detective Story. Her. Yeah.

Oh, and lest I forget to mention Katherine Moffat. No, she did not sit on a toffat eating curds and whey; she played Amanda, the love interest for poor buggy Michael, and herself has been featured in over 50 movies and TV series in a career that has extended since 1977. Not that she plays much of a character in the proceedings of The Beast Within, but I thought I'd better mention that, in spite of her lack of presence, she is an actress. So there.

Now I'm going to venture a guess that, for a 1982 movie that featured impressively bloody effects, relatively-unknown but well-versed actors and a fairly interesting storyline, an overall gross of nearly $8 million domestically is pretty impressive, and I'll also guess that it more than broke even, seeing that this was the kind of film that movie-goers stumbled over themselves to catch at the mega-cineplex during its two-week run while double-billed with The Last American Virgin or whatever.

As for me...I more or less liked it. That may not sound like a glowing endorsement you'd read on the back of a DVD box, and it may also be waffling when considering my feelings on other like films of this era, like Friday the 13th or Prom Night. But The Beast Within is NOT the same as those, either in terms of story in terms of execution (so to speak) or in terms of imagination. I'll grant you that this is certainly one of the more original kinds of mad killer movies that came out of the 1980s.

So yes, I will recommend that you find yourself a copy of The Beast Within and watch it with an open mind. I guarantee you'll never feel the same again when you hear a tree full of cicadas.

Cicadas. Ooohhh....