Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
I’m not shy about dropping the occasional curse on this blog. I tend to do so after the first couple of paragraphs to avoid offending anyone without their consent of opting to read further. That’s not going to be the case with La Bête (The Beast), a French horror film that is legitimately as much erotica as it is horror. You should know what you are getting into with this film. When I say that this is erotic horror, you need to think less “sexy” and more “porn for the artistic crowd.” This borders on In the Realm of the Senses levels of sexual content. If you decide to watch this, make sure your shades are drawn. You’ve been warned.
This is also going to be evident from the jump. La Bête opens with horses fucking, and again, I mean this legitimately. I mean giant horse dicks and pulsating horse vaginas. This is what lies ahead for us, because the “Beast” in the title is both a real beast and a sexual one, and so what’s to come is going to very much be what you’d expect if Penthouse decided to make Beauty and the Beast.
I am in no manner joking when I say this. In addition to substantial amounts of animal sex, we’re going to get full-frontal nudity, masturbation in various forms, and a bunch of fetishes at varying points in the movie. The basic plot is that a businessman has died, leaving his vast fortune to his daughter Lucy (Lisbeth Hummel) on the condition that she marry Mathurin de l’Esperance (Pierre Benedetti) within six months. Mathurin is the son of Pierre de l’Esperance (Guy Tréjan). Mathurin lives with his crippled uncle, Duc Rammaendelo de Balo (Marcel Dalio).
Lucy shows up to the crumbling farmhouse to witness the horse fucking, and pretty much everything from this point forward is going to be sexually charged. Pierre has a daughter named Clarisse (Pascale Rivault), who is constantly having sex with the family servant Ifany (Hassane Fall). They are frequently interrupted by Ifany being called to perform some task, which means that Clarisse has to finish herself off on the footboard of the bed.
For her part, Lucy does not seem much put out by all of the sex going on around her. She learns of an old family legend about a woman named Romilda (Sirpa Lane), who was forced to fight off a beast in the forest. Luck also finds some sketches that seem to indicate that Romilda wasn’t so much fighting off a beast as having sex with it. Eventually, Lucy is going to meet Mathurin, who is kind of a beast himself. After an unpleasant meal, Lucy retires to her room, where she dreams about being Romilda and being repeatedly ravaged by the creature in the forest. This is going to feature masturbation, nudity, monster sex, and Romilda being covered in monster ejaculate. There is obviously some simulated sex going on here, but some of this, I’m not convinced it was simulated.
Like I said at the top, this really feels a great deal like porn, and it’s not just people having sex. This is often violent and brutal—all of this happens in a sort of dream state, but there’s a reason La Bête is considered a horror movie, after all. Horror movies have often had a connection to sex, often seeing sex as a reason for the punishment of the characters who engage in it. There are movies like Salo where the sex is perverse and terrible, a true horror that doesn’t blur the line between pleasure and pain, but simply ignores it. La Bête doesn’t do that. We’re voyeurs here and we’re supposed to be.
I don’t quote myself that often, but now and again, I say something that is worth saying a second time. In this case, I’m going to quote my review of In the Realm of the Senses, the only other time this blog has dipped into something that was far more pornography than it was simply erotica:
“This is a story that could have just as easily been told without the explicit sex, and in fact could have likely been told much more completely that way. The sex is here as the reason to watch the film. It goes further and does it more often than a film like Last Tango in Paris that contains almost explicit sex acts for the exact same reason. Certainly there are people who will claim that they’re watching it for other reasons: [the setting], the taboo-breaking style, but most of them are just trying to justify their watching of what would be to most viewers pornography filmed artistically. No one watched Faces of Death for intelligent commentary on mortality; they watched it to see a guy get eaten by an alligator. Same thing here, just sexier. Folks can (and will) claim any reason they like for watching it, but it’s really all about the fuckin’.”
So, if you can’t get your fill of monster jizz and horse cocks, have at it—it's currently streaming on Kanopy.
Why to watch La Bête: Monster fucking.
Why not to watch: It’s essentially pornography.