The Beast Within

Written by Tom Holland, the man who would later direct the classic Fright Night, the story starts off in the early 60’s with a couple, played by Ronny Cox (Dick Jones from Robocop) and Bibi Besch (Wrath Of Kahn), who just got married. Sadly, that same night, Bibi gets raped by an inbred-looking deformed monster-man who just escaped from the cellar. Years later, their son, the spawn of such a rape, is going through a physical transformation. So the family return to the scene of the crime, a small town in Mississippi. There, their son becomes even worse, being possessed by the urge of revenge against the people who did his father wrong, and turning into a monstrous insect beast.
This is a very typical horror movie of the eighties. It’s almost like a serious version of films such as American Werewolf in London and Teen Wolf, taking basically the same plot only for scares more than for laughs. It has an ensemble cast that includes the great RG Armstrong, but there’s really not much to say about this. The cinematography is pretty flat and the screenplay isn’t solid enough to be the great horror film that it aspires to be. I’ll tell you what is great, though, and that’s the makeup effects. There’s a lot of those air-bladder makeup effects, with the inflating necks and body parts, and the final creature looks pretty damn badass. The scares are pretty solid, and the kill scenes are pretty damn cool, a particular favorite being the attack in the jail, and the embalmer’s death where he gets, well, embalmed. So it’s an average horror film, but after you watch it you’ll forget it as soon as you watched it. I still recommend it, since it is entertaining.