We might need another 25 years before we recover. Somewhere in the French countryside, an aristocratic family is crumbling from the inside out. The master of the house is so old and decrepit that snails sneak up on him, crawling on his hand as he nods off behind his desk. The black butler is banging all the young nubiles in the house, rutting in closets like teenagers in a sorority house. The resident clergymen are trading candy for sex with the teenage boys in the mansion. Typical wealthy French behavior, I reckon. Into this madness, an American heiress, Lucy Broadhurst (Lisbeth Hummel) arrives. She's to marry the son of the French aristocrat, saving the family fortune. Unfortunately, she's waylaid by the sight of two horses mating in the carriage ride over, and her sexual fears have reached a peak frenzy by the sight. As the Frenchies celebrate their new found money bags with more back room debauchery, Lucy begins dreaming of the giant monster penis that threatens to destroy them all.

And what dreams they are. The title Beast is some sort of were-dog/rat who struts around the woods in search of human females to plunder. As Lucy sleeps, the monster chances upon the strolling Sirpa Lane. He hunts her down, finding her hanging, bare-assed, from the branch of a tree. It is here that we catch our first glimpse of the swollen, blackened member, already leaking fluids before it even gets to peel her off the tree. It's the size of a chair leg, and it seems to never go limp, as the creature's sex drive is insatiable. All the struggling accidentally causes the Beast to erupt- Sirpa's flailing feet giving him the perfect foot job, and he collapses, briefly satisfied. Lucy awakens from her torrid dream, and searches the mansion for her fiance, oddly titillated as well as frightened by her experience.

Her fiance has taken ill with some debilitating fever, which we later find is the onset of the family curse, the Beast curse. Perhaps this isn't just a dream, after all. Lucy finds herself acting strangely, masturbating with a thorny rose, and making a bloody mess of it, before mounting the bed post. All in anticipation of her next encounter, whether real, or imagined, with the were-rat.

Obviously, Borwczyk shot the Beast with a smirk. Comic flourishes abound in this film, particularly when the naked butler chases the sweet young things around, undercutting the visceral effects of the faux-bestiality scenes, but not by much. Lucy takes the Beast in every possible manner, at one point practically bathing in his monster milk, rubbing her semen slathered breasts in sexual ecstasy. By the time she finally gets around to wrapping her lips around that thing, only the bravest in the room will still be around for the gothic conclusion. It's hard not to keep watching, despite the gross-out of the sex scenes, because the whole thing looks so damned gorgeous- the swirling forest, the creeper vine covered mansion, the stunning, and quite naked, Hummel- which is why this film is still discussed amongst more high-brow works of erotica than, say 'The Geek', the mid 70's porno quickie it most closely resembles. In that film, a gang of pimply assed hippies encounter some kind of yeti- in actuality, a slightly taller hippy in a bad monkey suit, with typically pornographic results. That's what the Beast reminds me of, but I'm kind of a shady character. You however, might more accurately see a lusty take on the Beauty and the Beast mythos taken to it's logical, surreal extreme, shot by a master at the craft of filming nude women.