Review of Flesh for the Beast (2003) by Blue B — 11 May 2010

Last night was the fatal night, finally. I watched Flesh For The Beast.

It had been skulking around in the shadows of my to-watch pile for a very long time. Every time I'd considered putting it on, something had happened to stop me. Call it fate, call it coincidence, call it some shade of luck - something had stopped me. Until now.

I will summarise the film first, in neutral terms -.

A group of psychic investigators are invited to cleanse a notorious haunted house by its reclusive wealthy owner. Many previous teams have tried and failed, at his behest (the trying, not the failure) - but this team is hopeful of success because of their newest member - a young woman with unusually powerful clairvoyant abilities.

The house's owner warns them that some of the manifestations of the spirit that infests the house have been remarkably harsh - perhaps worse than they might have had to deal with before.

It's a bit like Most Haunted.

Something else that I knew about it, that the casual viewer might not be privvy to, was that it was a low-budget horrorific splat-fest, from a production team previously known for ridiculous soft-core porn - titles including The Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the String and The Sexy Sixth Sense.

Undeterred (like a fool), I continued.

The film is officially 89 minutes long, and yet somehow watching it took about four hours. I cannot understand this at all - unless it is some insidious effect of the spiritual manifestations. Or because time seems to dilate and expand when under the influence of massive levels of tedium.

Flesh For The Beast is terribly, indescribably, dull.

The house is inhabited by a group of irresistibly sexy, wanton succubi - female demons who prey on idiotic men through manipulating their helpless sexual desires. The house's owner is in league with these evil creatures, providing group after group of psychics for them to feed on, under the pretence of ridding the house of its haunting.

Oh, that's a spoiler.

So is this: the young psychic girl is one of these she-demons too!

So, you make a low-budget horror film about irresistibly sexy devil women. You need them to seduce male characters and then rend them to giblets and bits. I suggest that you might not simply choose the first actresses prepared to get their fannies out and play in fake blood. Perhaps you might want to be patient during casting, and see if you could audition some actresses who were actually attractive. And if not attractive, at least not weirdly unpleasant-looking.

These evil women were annoying and unappealing. And preposterously, somehow became even less enticing once they'd thrown off their clothes to display the butcher's window to the hapless blokes. Really horrible.

Perhaps that's a little unfair to criticize?

Well, this isn't: Flesh For The Beast is badly-scripted, badly-shot, badly-edited, badly-lit, badly-acted, hopelessly dreary, non-frightening, ugly, irritating and just hard to watch.

There is a lot of blood and gore on display, but to be honest with you, by the time it really started spraying across the screen I was deep into fast-forward territory. Otherwise I feared the rotten film might simply never end. Ever.

Some truly bizarre scenes caused me to resume normal-speed playback on occasion though. Including one almost-indescribable sequence of naked ugly women with horrible tits carousing in the entrails and bits of some slain victims. It looked exactly how a video for the 80s rock band Heart would have looked, if they'd released a single called "I can't wait to repeatedly rub your spilled guts all up my tits.".

Exactly like that.

This film is useless. Please don't watch it, anybody.

Proper shit.

The only rating appropriate is: 2.