Flesh for the Beast

A group of parapyschologists get a job in an haunted old mansion. Media Blasters released this in R-rated & unrated versions. I choose to get the unrated version, naturally. When Media Blasters first annouced they planned to produce original movies, I was hopeful, as Media Blasters,while not my favorite distributer of Dvds (that would be Blue Underground), are still up there. To say I was let down is a bit of an understatement. This piece of cinematic waste was written & directed by Terry West, known for his soft-core parodies (ie. Spider-babe, Lord of the G-strings, etc..). This movie reminded me of his soft-core flicks, not for it's sex scenes (those are laughably bad in this one), but for the insanely lousy acting. Horror fans deserve SO MUCH better. On a bright note, the girl who plays Erin is a vegetarian, luckily for her her role (and this film) has NO meat to it whatsoever.

My Grade: D-

Dvd Extras: Behind the scenes; Interviews with Caroline Hoermann and Aldo Sambrell (with his past, he deserved much better then this movie, in my opinion); Teaser trailer; stills gallery; Trailers for "the Virgin of Nuremberg" (with no sound), "Zombi 2", "Faceless", and "Blood Feast 2"

Eye candy: pretty much all the actresses get fully nude at some point.

Easter Egg: Highlight the Teaser in the extras menu, then press left for a live clip of the band "Buckethead"

This movie was absolutely terrible. I am sometimes quite shocked that such ideas receive funding and actually make it to video. After watching the movie, it's actually quite hilarious listening to the director and producer wax philosophic about the degree of professionalism and quality they were attempting to achieve (but didn't). An especially funny moment (in the behind the scenes) was the producer describing how they spent literally months crafting the story and putting it together when one gets quite the opposite impression after viewing it.

I rarely rail on movies with such frankness, but this one almost angered me for wasting my time with such a poor effort. It only goes to show that it is not the paintbrush which makes a man a painter, but the images he creates.

FLESH FOR THE BEAST has a great name, I'll give it that. But it's a bad, bad, bad movie. Even for fans of the genre, who considers films like these as guilty pleasures, there's just no getting around the fact that BEAST is a bad movie, through and through. Worst of all, the director was responsible for a sea of cheapie sex flicks, but you wouldn't know that considering how awful the fake sex in BEAST is. I kid you not. You would expect someone who spent so much time shooting sex scenes, and movies with naked women, would somehow develop a knack for fine T&A. But alas, BEAST doesn't even give the viewer that. The gore is fine, but it could have been better. As a whole, the film is poorly executed, and the acting is, as expected, quite atrocious.

3 out of 10

Excuse me, but I had to puke just remembering this film (if you can call it that).

Okay, who lets these people buy cameras and sneak their crap into the movie system? I started checking who makes the movies before I rent them, but this one slipped through,and believe me, the company is added to my "don't rent" list...right up there with Fangoria.

Don't get me wrong, I allow a lot of gray area for lower budget movies, because I am a die hard Horror fan, but I still believe if you spend money, you should at least be entertained, even if it is poorly.

This, on the other hand was one of those movies that don't do anything. I think at one point, I forgot to take it off of pause when I came back from wandering around outside out of boredom and it was in screen saver mode. It took me a few minutes of thinking the action was getting better to realize that it was the name of the DVD player floating around the screen, and I put it into "play" mode, missing the screen saver already.

Hands down, this is a movie that shouldn't have ended up in the rental place. If folks want these, get them from Rhino, don't torture us normal people by sneaking them into the actual movies by making a cool cover, distracting us with boobs and neat monster art, fooling us int renting them.

With so many lame, low-budget horror DVDs misleading fans through the use of salacious cover-art, carefully selected stills, and provocative blurb, it's nice to find one that finally makes good on its packaging's promise of copious amounts of sex and violence.

Flesh for the Beast is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination—the story is clichéd nonsense, the acting is average at best (even from its two 'names', Caroline Munro and Aldo Sambrell), and the direction is uninspired—but it does feature enough gratuitous full-frontal female nudity and gruesome gore to satisfy most depraved viewers' lust for flesh, whether it be for the pink and supple kind, or the ragged, red and bloody variety.

As in Armand Weston's The Nesting (1981), Roberta Findlay's Blood Sisters (1987) and Lucio Fulci's The Ghosts of Sodom (1988), writer/director Terry West's Flesh for the Beast is set in a building that used to be a brothel, and which is now the centre of terrifying paranormal activity. The owner of the building, John Stoker (Sergio Jones) hires a team of parapsychologists to try and cleanse the property, but one-by-one the visitors are seduced and killed by the evil succubi that dwell there.

This rather cheesy set-up might not be that original, but it does allow for plenty of sleazy shenanigans, with the demons first appearing as randy young women in order to shag their intended victims, before eventually turning nasty and yanking out their internal organs and generally making a lot of mess: during the course of the film, Jones is absolutely drenched in the red stuff, one guy pukes up his guts (literally), the naked ladies playing the succubi writhe enthusiastically in a pool of blood and assorted organs, and even Caroline Munro joins in the bloody fun, having her throat cut at the end of her one brief scene.

Having seen a ton of low-budget horror way worse than Flesh for the Beast, I am genuinely surprised by the mostly disparaging comments here on IMDb. Don't people like honest-to-goodness sex and blood in their horror anymore?