Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

"The Beast Within" combines many different horror tropes. It plays like a werewolf movie without the werewolf at times. A Southern town with a dark secret is the primary setting. There are elements of demonic possessions and revenge from beyond the grave. Most famously, in the last half-hour, the movie explodes into body horror, with a vivid transformation and a monster gorily dismembering victims. The gritty violence and setting feels like '70s Savage Cinema, but the show-stopping creature effects puts it in the company of other effects-heavy early eighties flicks, like "American Werewolf" "The Thing," or "The Howling." The setting of Naoba, Missisipi provides Southern-fried atmosphere that's hard to resist, especially when the moon shines through fog and tree branches. The story slowly puts down clues, drawling the audience in. The eventual transformation is set up subtly. The special effects are fantastic. Michael's transformation is the film's center-piece. It's so climatic that it almost spoils the last act. However, Philippe Mora's strong direction builds suspense through frenzied performances, noise clattering outside, and wisely delivered gore. The decapitation here is one of my favorites. The violence is calculated through-out, as the first murder, the mortuary sequence, and the electric kill are equally measured by suspense and make-up.The cast is peppered with memorable faces, among them R.G. Armstrong and Don Gordon. Ronny Cox and Bibi Bersh are both excellent as the concerned parents, totally unprepared for what happens to their son. Cox, in particular, makes his everyman role highly relatable. L.Q. Jones is especially likable as the tough, no-nonsense sheriff, the only man in Naoba not involved in the conspiracy. If there's a performance that doesn't work, it's Paul Clemens as the troubled boy. He's frequently good when snarling threats but is less convincing as a normal teenager.The script is by Todd Holland who quickly established himself as a reliable genre draftsman. The ambiguous story is frequently criticized. The story suggests that cannibalism and years of abuse is enough to transform a man into something inhuman. The possession, reincarnation, and bizarre metamorphosis are unexplained. Did Billy Corwin come back through pure force of will? Similarly, the connection with cicadas seems to have resulted through environmental influence. He imprinted on the forest and, likewise, it imprinted on him. Supposedly, about twenty minutes of deleted scenes would have clarified these details but, nah, I like it the way it is. You could probably criticize the movie for its underdeveloped love story but I like that too. Michael and Amanda have chemistry together and their hormones-heavy love-at-first-sight romance is exactly right for a pair of teenagers with overly protective parents.Not every element works. Les Baxter's score, his last, is bit confused, sounding one minute like a 1950s monster movie while featuring throbbing, overdone synth the next. The ending is hopelessly anticlimactic. The threat is dealt with too quickly and the emotional fallout isn't focused on enough. Overall though, that last atmospheric shot of an old house in the darkness hits my horror-fan sweet spot. "The Beast Within" is a cult gem for me.

This horror film, about a woman brutally attacked one night, and years later has to relive the memory when her son becomes the suspect in a series of brutal murders, is appalling trash, utterly without value. Story is pure crass exploitation, not to mention utterly ridiculous and ultimately nonsensical. Good actors wasted in this junk, further ruined by some dreadful F/X, especially the big transformation sequence in the hospital, which looks like it was made for 25 cents, so unintentionally laughable is the end result.Directed by Philippe Mora, who would go on to direct the equally bad "Howling II & III".

The changing into a monster of a young man is used as a metaphor for boys growing into men. The body goes through changes and urges become more primal. Suddenly playing center field for your baseball team is less alluring than chasing skirts. THE BEAST WITHIN perfectly captures this sentiment.The film focuses on teenage Michael (Paul Clemens) who has an illness that the doctors can't identify. It seems that young Michael is changing into a beast--one that resembles a humanoid creature that sexually assaulted his mother seventeen years ago. His parents, played by Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch, try to learn more about what happened seventeen years ago and venture to the town where she was raped by the monster: a sleepy, backwoods Mississippi community. They leave Michael at the hospital but he breaks out and some urge lures him to the small town his parents are visiting.While in this small Mississippi hamlet, Michael begins to succumb to urges: eating flesh and chasing the local hotty (Kitty Moffat). But these urges aren't your normal teenage male pursuits and Michael fears for Amanda's (Moffat) safety when he learns that members of her family are being targeted by a serial killer--the beast within.STORY: $$$ (The story is quite interesting. We get a nice little isolated setting with eccentric hillbilly characters who all seem to harbor a dark secret. Cox and Besch as the concerned parents try their hardest to uncover the secrets so they can save their child. The script builds enough suspense to sustain interest but the falling down of females in the woods seems a bit foolish. Bibi runs into a tree and Kitty looses her bearings too easily).ACTING: $$$$ (A helluva lot better than you see in the usual B-Rate film. Clemens is terrific as young Michael. His scenes where his body changes are brilliant displays of acting. He masterfully portrays agony. L.Q. Jones shines as the town sheriff, Mike's parents only real ally in the backwoods community. The underrated Ronny Cox is great as Mike's dad. He knows that Michael isn't his son but still shows him the amount of love he'd show a boy direct from his loins. Don Gordon and John Dennis Johnston are effectively slimy as backwoods villains and Kitty Moffat is solid in the role of Michael's forbidden fruit. But the best piece of acting belongs to Bibi Besch. There's little for her to do in the script but Bibi gets more out of this character than most actresses could extract. There's a scene, in which Miss Besch has no dialogue, where she learns that her son is becoming something akin to the monster that raped her years ago. Bibi exhibits such raw emotion in the scene that you, the viewer, know exactly what is going through her mind without her having to say a word. Give Bibi a standing ovation).NUDITY: $$$ (What would be a movie about teen lust without a little titillation? Bibi is stripped bare in the woods by a monster at the beginning of the film while Kitty Moffat suffers the same treatment at the close of the film. Creepy morgue attendant Luke Askew also spends some time ogling a buxom dead body in his morgue).

THE BEAST WITHIN is a decent horror film. While not a bad film like the Leonard Maltin guide would suggest, it does suffer from a script that certainly needed a re-write.The film begins with a couple on their honeymoon. Their car becomes stuck and while the husband goes for help, the wife is raped by a "thing". It's humanoid but it's also hard to tell exactly what it was in this rather graphic and bloody scene. The woman is soon discovered by the husband and she is still alive.The film now takes up 17 years later. The couple have since had a teenage son who is in the hospital with some odd malady. He's apparently dying and the hospital has no idea what's happening to him. The couple wonder if perhaps their teen is not actually the husband's progeny but that of the monster-like thing that raped the wife those many years ago. So, they leave the kid in the hospital and make their way to the small Texas town where she was violated. However, instead of finding answers, many of the townspeople feign ignorance--saying they know nothing of the rape or any other violent crimes. However, the wife is able to uncover evidence that they are lying.Fortunately, the sheriff takes their inquiry more seriously. That's because after their son miraculously 'recovered' and joined his parents in Texas, a human hand was discovered in the swamp. Something obviously violent and evil is afoot (or should that be 'ahand'?). Many skeletons are unearthed once the police team arrives and it seems that the bodies were perhaps already dead bodies that were stolen from the undertaker.At the same time, townspeople start dying one by one and in very, very violent ways. Oddly, they are all from the same family as well as their friends and it seems someone wants to exact revenge on them in particular. After a while, the evidence seems to point to the teen, though they wonder how could this sweet boy be behind the grisly murders. When it's apparent that the boy is the reincarnation of 'Bobby' (who somehow was implanted in the mother by Bobby when she was raped), all hell breaks loose.Now at this point in the film, the film is pretty exciting and cool. The idea of an evil person or being that is able to rape a woman in order to come back years later to exact revenge is certainly novel. In addition, the murders and the acting were all pretty good. However, when the boy starts to morph into some monster, the film stops making any sense at all and the transformation seems unnecessary and even cheesy. This just didn't work and took a good film and turned it into a goofy film towards the end--sort of like merging this film with THE EVIL DEAD! It's a shame, too, as the film was really engaging up until the goofy metamorphosis.By the way, there are two rather graphic rape scenes and this is certainly NOT a film for kids. I have heard that this film is a popular film on late night TV and with the rape scenes edited down, it's a much more family-friendly film.