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.

So it may not be Rosemary and it may not be at all really connected, especially this going full gore. But there are some similarities and the inciting incidents is one of them. I did have an issue with how that was handled in the Polanski movie, this one does a "neat" trick by jumping forward timewise, so we don't really see how this is handled after the fact.

Now you may like that or hate it, but it is what it is. When you get over that, you get quite the tense story and quite the explicitly shown violence on screen. The effects may have looked better to the viewers back then (didn't really survive the test of time entirely),but they still are something to be amazed by. If you can remember the time they were made and everything they had in their power to do them. No CGI obviously and the story is predictable to say the least ... it is the horror aspect that will either get you or leave you cold

Absolutely absurd, preposterously hyperbolic and incredibly incomprehensible pseudo-Southern Gothic small town horror monster mystery rubbish, executed with such fervid go-for-broke zeal that it manages to become freakishly entertaining almost despite (or perhaps even because of) its brooding melodramatic atmosphere.

1964: Newlyweds Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch get lost on a remote Mississippi backwoods road. Some horrible, monstrous sub-human cannibal thing that's in dire need of both a bath and especially a shave (it's got the ugliest, nastiest hairy legs you never want to lay eyes on) escapes from a cellar that it's been imprisoned in and rapes Besch, impregnating her in the process. 1982: Cox and Besch now have a teenage son (an admirably game portrayal by Paul Clemens, who tries very hard in an impossible role) who's suffering from an odd, seemingly incurable disease. With sonny boy in tow, Cox (who gives a hilarious deadpan performance, mouthing the most asinine dialogue with a remarkable poker face) and Besch return to the seedy, squalid hillbilly hamlet located nearby the woods where Besch was attacked. Next thing you know, Junior starts periodically changing into a hideous, dangerous, gigantic humanoid insect creature, viciously slaughtering various scuzzball local yokels who in one way or another are accountable for his woeful plight. It ultimately transpires that the poor lad is possessed by the vengeful spirit of the unsightly flesh-eating furry-legged fiend, meaning that repercussions of past atrocities are finally catching up with the present. Got that?

The feverishly overwrought direction by Philippe Mora (who previously did the excellent "Mad Dog Morgan" and went on to helm the wonderfully wretched "Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf"),combined with American International Pictures composer Les Baxter's thunderous, suitably overblown score, Tom ("Prophecy," "Cat People") Burman's riotously rubbery and unconvincing make-up f/x, an impenetrably convoluted plot, a handful of outrageously gruesome and splatterific murders, a climactic transformation scene that's uproariously bungled by both Mora and Burman, and the alarmingly hammy acting from a manic supporting cast which includes a particularly hysterical Don Gordon as the scummy burg's oily, bewigged jerk of a mayor (with his wire rim glasses and bad hairpiece Gordon bears an uncanny resemblance to noted sci-fi author Harlan Ellison),the adorable Kitty Moffat as a sweet, comely hick chick, John Dennis Johnson as Moffat's abusive, overbearing redneck dad, Luke Askew as a corrupt undertaker, Logan Ramsey as a belligerent fat cracker, Ron Soble as a boozy Native American who knows what's really going on, and a pre-"Designing Women" Mesach Taylor as the token black deputy (only Sam Peckinpah regular L.Q. Jones as the earnest, yet feckless sheriff and the ever-reliable R.G. Armstrong as an equally sincere, but ineffectual folksy physician display any restraint amid all the eye-rolling histrionics, although their commendable subdued efforts prove to be all for naught),ensures that this sweaty, ludicrous and hopelessly muddled misbegotten mess plays like a gloriously ripe and ridiculous unintentional elaborate cinematic shaggy dog joke parody of the demonic possession fright film sub-genre.