Michael MacCleary - The offspring conceived by Caroline and
the mutated Billy Connors. Though Michael seems to be normal, aside from the debilitating
"disease" he's suddenly come down with, he soon develops strange habits (like eating human flesh). Mike's doctor (aptly
named Doc) believes it's all just growing pains, which ironically enough is true since Mike
literally grows right out of his own skin during the film's climax!
Eli MacCleary - Ronny Cox! Michael's father by marriage. He's having a tough time
coping with Mike's condition and the fact that Mike isn't his biological son. He is so full of rage that he pretty
much gets in a scuffle with every male character in the movie, including his mutated son!
Caroline MacCleary - Bibi Besch! Seventeen years ago, she was raped by a mysterious creature.
Once Michael becomes sick, she and Eli decide it's time to uncover who (or what) Michael's father was, and spearheads a
fact-finding mission to Nioba.
Doc Schoonmaker - R.G. Armstrong! Nioba's leading physician. He's basically around to provide expository feedback while
unsuccessfully treating Michael's rapid mutation.
Sheriff Pool - Nioba's law enforcement official and bastard child of Tom Atkins and Clint Eastwood. He takes
a covered up murder and the appearance of a monster in his town pretty well; this guy is as cool as a cucumber.
Deputy Herbert - Meschach Taylor! The only black man in this film. Normally, especially in a Horror film from this
decade, that would be a bad thing. However, he survives the onslaught of the reincarnated Billy Connors, and eventually becomes
a flamboyant employee at a department store, where hot Kim Cattrall mannequins come to life! Congrats deputy!
Judge Curwin - Not only the judge of Nioba but it's mayor. He helped cover up the whole
Billy Connors incident when it happened seventeen years ago. He is decapitated by mutant Mike.
Edwin Curwin- The owner of Nioba's newspaper and apparently the only person that writes
for it. He stupidly lets Michael into his house and ends up as a partially devoured corpse.
Dexter Curwin - The town's mortician. He is embalmed alive by Michael.
Horace Platt - Judge Curwin's crazy cousin and Amanda's abusively overprotective father. He feels pretty tough when he's pointing
a gun at someone until he witnesses Michael's transformation. Horace is mauled to death offscreen and his corpse is
later found in a tree.
Amanda Platt - Horace's none too bright daughter and Michael's love interest. She gets in
a small car accident while attempting to leave Nioba. This of course leaves her stranded and helpless, and
she becomes the movie's second rape victim.
Tom Laws - The town drunk and old friend of Billy Connors. Michael tosses poor Tom onto
some high voltage equipment, thus burning him to a crisp.
Lionel Curwin - Also known as "Sir Not Appearing in this Film." This religious zealot's vengeful acts against Billy Connors
are what sets this strange tale in motion.
Billy Connors - We only get to see Billy in his monstrous mutated form
when he rapes Caroline and gets the story rolling. How did Billy become a hulking, horny man-beast?
Well apparently Billy Connors slept with Lionel Curwin's wife. In a rage, Lionel killed his
own wife and then imprisoned Billy in the cellar. Then, over an extended period of time, Lionel
fed corpses (including his wife's) to poor Billy. Billy also had some sort of hoodoo powers that allowed him to talk to animals
and insects, which somehow allowed him to transform into, "The Cicada-Man!" As the film progresses, it seems that Billy has
come back, reborn in the body of his biological son, Michael MacCleary! Will he be stopped before he wreaks bloody vengeance
upon the relatives of Lionel Curwin?!
"We dare you to watch the last 30 minutes of this film without
screaming, covering your eyes, or running from your seat." That was the original tagline for the
movie upon it's release and it strikes me as funny. Why? Because those responsible for this
picture (director Phillipe Mora perhaps?) are giving a lot of hype to the film's "final terrifying thirty minutes." One would assume
that the rest of the movie garbage and not worth seeing. But that is a fallacy folks, because
this movie is actually pretty damned good!
This twisted tale starts on in 1964, in the little town of Nioba, Mississippi. Eli and Caroline MacCleary
have just gotten married and are passing through Mississippi on the way to their honeymoon. As they're driving down a dark
road, Eli realizes he is going the wrong way, and attempts a u-turn. Instead, he ends up getting the car stuck
in a ditch. He decides to leave Caroline behind with their dog as he goes to the gas station down the road.
(Stupid, stupid, stupid! Do you not care about your new bride?!) In the amount of time it takes for him to get back,
a monstrous creature kills the dog and rapes Caroline.
Fast forward seventeen years and it turns out that Caroline gave birth to a son named Michael.
It seems the lad has recently fallen ill, with what his doctor diagnoses as an overactive pituitary
gland. It seems that time is running out for poor Michael, so Eli and Caroline go to Nioba in
search of some answers. They poke around a bit trying to find out who (or what) raped Caroline.
Eli visits Judge Curwin and gets absolutely no information from him, but Caroline finds an interesting front page article, about the death of Lionel
Curwin when she visits the local newspaper archive.
They follow up this discovery by visiting Sheriff Pool and get additional information about the death of Lionel Curwin.
Apparently something mauled him, ate him, and tried to torch his house. (Hmm... must've been a bear.) That very evening, Michael leaves the
hospital and drives to Nioba. He visits Lionel Curwin's old house first, then makes his way to
Edwin Curwin's place. Edwin mistakes Michael for a delivery boy, gives him some money, and
then offers the drooling teen some hamburger. I guess Michael misunderstood the offer, because he leaps upon
Edwin and starts gnawing on the middle-aged man's neck.
Michael then staggers around Nioba until he comes to Horace Platt's place where he meets Amanda
Platt, just before he collapses to the ground. The next day, Michael awakens in the local hospital and seems perfectly
fine. Instead of getting the prescribed "bed rest" that Doc Schoonmaker thinks he needs, Michael decides to swing by the
Platt residence to see Amanda and thank her. Using his charm, he talks Amanda into going for a stroll with him. The two of them walk through a
nearby swamp and soon start making out on the ground. (Wow... Michael's a pretty smooth operator.) Amanda's dog had
followed them along and starts digging up something nearby. That something turns out to be a severed arm, which the dog
playfully carries over to the two horny teens.
 
"AHHHHHHH! I CAN'T BELIEVE I JUST MADE OUT WITH YOU!" |
After a quick time lapse, the police have arrived and begin searching for more bodies. By nightfall they
discover the motherload; nearly thirty-six rotting corpses in all. Doc takes a look at one such body
and realizes that it was one of his former patients. ("I'd recognize that stainless steel ball-joint
anywhere!") Then Sheriff Pool, Doc, and Eli all go and question Nioba's mortician, Dexter Curwin. Naturally,
Dexter denies having any knowledge of the recently discovered bodies. With the questioning going nowhere, the trio of
investigators ventures off to poke around in the town's graveyard. They dig up an old woman's grave (the aforementioned owner of the
stainless steel joint that Doc had installed) and find the coffin devoid of human remains. (Uh oh... Dexter, you have some 'splaining to do!)
They then decides to return to the mortuary (wait, did you guys remember to fill the grave back in?!) only to discover
that Dexter has been embalmed... ALIVE! Moments later, it's discovered that Michael has once again wandered off, so
everyone hightails it to Horace Platt's house. They wake up Horace, who is as ornery as ever, and being arguing until
Amanda's screams are heard upstairs. Everyone races to the rescue and finds Michael standing in her bedroom. Michael explains
that there's a killer on the loose (and no one wonders how he knew that?!) and he was only there to protect the girl,
though seconds earlier, he was about to bludgeon her to death. Horace and Eli have a brief scuffle and then everyone goes
home. Which reminds me, there are two recurring things in this movie that sort of annoyed me.
Every time Eli and Caroline discuss Michael's "medical condition," they always mention taking
him to Houston for treatment. You know what? Stop talking about it and just do it already! That makes up at
least a quarter of the script right there for chrissakes! Secondly, Eli manages to have a brief scuffle with
a majority of the male cast by the end of the movie. He'll get angry, grab some dude by the collar and start screaming in his
face at the drop of a dime. Is he obsessed with being the alpha male or something?!
 
If anything, the embalming greatly improved Dexter's likeability. |
At this point in the film, Michael (in Billy Connors psycho mode) has murdered Tom Laws, and is beginning to discover
that he's losing complete control. Because of that, he pays Amanda Platt a visit and begs her to leave Nioba.
He tells her to leave town immediately because the killer is after all the Curwins. Amanda refuses at first until Michael
loses patience and grabs her, causing her to slice her finger with a knife. She finally agrees and goes upstairs to change her
clothes while Michael snacks on a dab of her spilled blood.
This awakens the beast within Mike, and he slowly creeps upstairs. Using his (suddenly) immense strength,
he rips off the doorknob to Amanda's room and rushes in and demands that she leave. Amanda refuses to
depart so Mike loses control and begins choking her. He suddenly stops, realizes what he tried
to do, and leaps out of a second story window. A short time later, Michael awakens in the local
clinic and everyone's there (excluding Judge Curwin and Horace, but they'll be along
shortly). As Doc checks the large line of broken skin on Mike's back, the mutating teen
continuously yells, "KILL ME, KILL ME, KILL ME!" He eventually quiets down much to everybody's
relief. Believing that the worst is over, Eli and the police leave the hospital.
Judge Curwin and Horace seize this opportunity and barge into the small medical facility with the
intention of filling Michael with buckshot. However, they stop short when the see the disgusting
spectacle before them: Mike finally begins his transformation into a Cicada-Man! Instead of
running away, the horrified onlookers stand there, frozen with fear, allowing Michael to turn into a screaming, bubbling mass
of human flesh. Eventually, Horace loses what little courage and self-control he has and fires two shots into Mike with no
effect. Mutant Mike retaliates by knocking out Horace and hauling him off.
 
"Everyone... I'm afraid Michael has been stricken with an accute case of 'Linda Blair-a-citis.'" |
In the meantime, Amanda is well on her way out of Nioba but fails to see a very obvious roadblock in the center of the road
and swerves her vehicle into a ditch. The minor collision is enough to knock her out for a bit, leaving her helpless and alone.
A few miles back in Nioba, the remaining cast has taken refuge in the town jail. This is where we learn all about the
origin of Billy Connors. Though the Judge's tale clears up the mystery of the corpses in the swamp, it didn't explain how
eating human flesh transformed Billy into the dreaded Cicada-Man. The monster formerly known as Michael begins smashing its way
into the prison, so everyone falls back into the tiny cellblock. Judge Curwin is terrified and has himself locked in a cell
for protection but alas, it fails.
Michael smashes through the concrete wall of the cell and plucks Judge Curwin's head right off his shoulders (just as
you or I would pluck a grape from a vine ... minus the blood of course). Afterward, Michael departs
from town and tracks down Amanda with his super cicada tracking skills. She attempts to flee but ends up taking a spill that knocks
her temporarily unconscious, allowing Cicada-Mike to have his way with her. After "mating," the creature apparently
develops "Bambi legs" and ends up taking a rest in a mud pit.
Eli arrives on the scene first and decides to investigate and make sure the monster is dead. It
turns out that Michael was only playing 'possum (or just really tired from bumping uglies with Amanda) and Eli ends up
grappling for his life. Luckily Caroline reacts quickly and picks up the shotgun that Eli dropped. She fires off both shots and
decimates her mutant son's skull, thus ending his short reign of terror. Still, that was too little too late since Mike
managed to rape Amanda. Will the Beast Within be unleashed a second time?!
I first watched The Beast Within on TNT's MonsterVision many years
ago and was overjoyed at how downright twisted the film was. Though it's pacing is slow, this film is saved by all the
great acting, and an intriguing storyline. The idea that a monster can pass on its memories and emotions through the ahm...
"sharing" of its DNA is an interesting concept, but sadly the movie only touches briefly upon that. (This is a shame because
this is a major plot point in the novel that this film was adapted from.) Also, I really liked how
this film puts a new spin on the rape & revenge cinematic formula.
 
"It's not a too-mah!" |
Typically, a rape & revenge film features a woman that is raped by one (or usually several) men, beaten badly, and left for
dead. She eventually recovers (physically), then goes about ending the lives of her attackers in brutal and sadistic ways. Here,
we get the opposite of that. A woman is raped by a (male) creature, who passes on its genetic memories and craving for revenge to her
offspring. Once Michael hits puberty, the memories stored in his genetic code begin to leak out and slowly begin to infringe
upon, and ultimately take over, his conscious mind. On top of that, it physically changes him into a monster with only two things
on its mind: Kill the Curwins and make a baby!
Coupled with this scientific origin of the film's monster is a strange, almost supernatural aspect in the backstory, that explains
how Lionel Curwin turned into the original "Cicada-Man." There are various tales across the world that describe what
happens to a man that eats human flesh (e.g. ghouls, wendigos, etc.),
and there's some of that folklore in this film. By eating the flesh of the deceased, while chained up in the darkness of Lionel
Curwin's root cellar, Billy Connors began to change into something more akin to a beast than a man.
At first the change was only mental, but eventually he began to take on some physical aspects due to the harsh environment
he was surviving in. But that still doesn't explain how he turned into an actual monster, whose offspring would basically turn
into him seventeen years after its birth. As Doc Schoonmaker mentions quite briefly in the film, Billy had sort of innate ability to communicate with
animals, including insects. And apparently he had some strange fascination with cicadas, which of course have a life cycle
of seventeen years, and, much like Michael, leave the remains of their molted “skin” on the branches of trees after they
mature.
But how does that give Billy Connors the ability to become a Cicada-Man? Well, I'm just gonna chalk that up to good ole-fashioned
Southern hoodoo. As stated on the Hoodoo Wikipedia Page,
"The goal of hoodoo is to allow people access to supernatural forces to improve their daily lives by gaining power in many
areas of life, including luck, money, love, divination, revenge, health, employment, and necromancy. As in
many other folk religions, magical, and medical practices, extensive use is made of herbs, minerals, parts of animals' bodies, an individual's
possessions, and bodily fluids, especially menstrual blood, urine and semen."
 
"Would you all stop staring at me and run already?!" |
Now I may be jumping to conclusions here (mostly because I like this movie a lot, and get annoyed whenever anyone calls the
monster's origins "stupid" or "nonsensical"), but this seems like the only way a man forced into cannibalism can turn
into a monster and pass on his memories to his teenaged offspring. So in essence: Hoodoo magic plus genetic
memory equals CICADA MAN! Add in an unsuspecting rape victim and multiply that by seventeen years and you get CICADA MAN JR.!
(B-movie mathematics at its finest!)
My misgivings about The Beast Within are few, with my main problem
being the monster itself. The main draw of the movie is witnessing the main character's painful transformation into a
flesh-eating rape-machine, but we see so little of the monster in its final form. The creature is kept in complete darkness
in the film's opening moments, and even when its offspring goes on a small rampage in the final act, the monster suit is mostly
kept in the shadows. We get a few quick glimpses of its face and claws, but we never truly get a good look at it.
(Sheesh. Was the creature suit really that bad?)
All in all though, this is a worthwhile creature feature that may bore some (the pacing is admittedly slow) or offend others.
You'll never know for sure until you watch it though, so definitely give The Beast Within
a chance. If anything, it is head and shoulders above most films of its ilk, if only because so much effort is put into the human
element of the story. After all, the film is essentially the tale of two parents who must strive through a dark moment in their past
in order to save their son's life. The fact that their son ends up turning into a monster/rapist at the end is just icing
on the cake as far as I'm concerned! (Plus this movie gets extra points for having Peter Cullen, a.k.a. OPTIMUS PRIME,
narrating the theatrical trailer.)
With all that said (and to paraphrase this film's tagline), I dare you to watch the full 98 minutes of THE BEAST WITHIN
without screaming, covering your eyes, or running from your seat!
So how radioactive is this "rapey" creature feature?
Geiger Counter Reading:
- FOUR 'RADS' -
WARNING: This movie is very radioactive!
A talented cast, an intriguing story, atmospheric music,
old school practical effects, and two scenes of
"monster rape," make this cult oddity worth seeking out!
Sheriff Pool: "Oral sodomy eh? Well that's why it's a small town.
Yep. We'll look into it. Thank you for callin'."
Vault Master says: I don't know what's worse about this phone conversation. The fact that someone
reported some "ass to mouth" action to the local Sheriff, or the fact that he's so damned calm about it.)
Michael: "It took me seventeen years Tom, like the Cicadas. But I came back!"
- Beginning - Does the full moon really warrant this type of music?
- 6 3/4 minutes - Nine out of ten monsters agree: Boobs are awesome!
- 18 1/4 minutes - Nioba has a YUM YUM DONUT SHOP!
- 22 1/4 minutes - THE FIRST NIGHT...
- 29 ˝ minutes - Hungry? Why wait?
- 37 3/4 minutes - I hate when a dog carrying a severed, rotting arm ruins a makeout session.
- 40 ˝ minutes - Why is Eli staying? What help could he possibly provide?
- 54 minutes - " ... Dexter's been embalmed. Alive."
- 60 3/4 minutes - Michael's MOLTING?! Nothing a little penicillin won't clear up, right Doc?
- 70 3/4 minutes - Mutating humans hate doorknobs!
- 78 minutes - How did Amanda not see that roadblock?!
- 79 minutes - I guess this is the start of the "final terrifying thirty minutes of,
The Beast Within!"
- 83 ˝ minutes - Hahahaha! Judge Curwin wears a toupee!
- 95 minutes - I've said it before and I'll say it again: Monsters love boobs.
- 96 minutes - The End Credits.
LEAVE YOUR OWN COMMENTS ABOUT THIS MOVIE IN...
And feel free to e-mail me at vault_master[at]bmoviefilmvault[dot]com if you have any
questions, personal recommendations, or information about the films reviewed here on the site! Don't be shy! Your
feedback helps make The Vault better!
Review posted on June 22, 2002.
(Review last updated on June 6, 2011.)
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