THE BEAST

Polish animator-turned-cinematic provocateur Walerian Borowczyk's most notorious film wildly re-works Beauty and the Beast into an adult fairy tale that parodies pornographic tropes and assaults all notions of "good taste." Bestial dreams interrupt the plans of a French aristocrat to marry off Mathurin, his deformed son, to Lucy, a horny American heiress. Yet Mathurin seems more interested in his horses than in his bride-to-be. When Lucy discovers the story of an 18th-century ancestor copulating with the titular beast, it sparks to life one of the most outrageous sequences in cinema history. THE BEAST is cool, even restrained, in the manner of the contemporaneous late Buñuel. And as in Buñuel, the line between dream and reality becomes difficult to distinguish in the film’s most sexual sequences. Buckle up and take a trip to the very wild side but watch out, this beast has more than mere claws!