The Beast Within ( 1982, Phillipe Mora)

TBW is what I call a not great movie. It's not kitsch Ed Wood so bad it's hip to laugh at ( I don't have time for that sort of Misty 3k stuff anyway) but its far from a masterpiece. Some not great movies are perfect on their own terms. The Beast Within is ot perfect.
A recently married couple take a sloppy U-turn on a rural road and wind up in a ditch near a very dark wood. DH goes for help, leaving Wifey and dog behind. A cicada manster rapes and impregnates Wifey and kils the dog. Seventeen years later Michael, her only child, is unwell due to what Doc, the family's primary care provider, calls "growing pains." If it were only that simple. I won't give away the slowly unfurlimg and twisty storyline of TBW except to say that if you enjoy ancestral vengeance, grisly if dated makeup effects and, of course, cicadas, have a vada at The Beast Within.
Australian French transplant Mora has directed a variety of pictures from the true crime drama Death of a Soldier and the Dennis Hopper vehicle Mad Dog Morgan to the collage Swastsia and the adaptation of Whitley Strieber's memoir of outre visits and visiters Communion. Communion is seen as a train wreck by many but it's a favorite of mine. I used to be able to recite entire scenes. I was convinced that something
Michael Mann's adaptation of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon is very much an 80s movie. Mann's visual style, especially his celebrated fondness for architecture, is reigned in. We're posed a psychological question - how does a man nearly killed by his singular talents feel and behave when compelled to use them again? -enclosed in a sleek thriller about a pair of serial killers, a novice ( Tom Noonan) being advised by a fearsome king of killers Hannibal Lecktor ( Brian Cox). William Peterson looks like a retired twink rocker in this film.The look on his face during the dreaming-on-a-flight scene evokes an emotional vortex. Cox only has a few minutes screen time but his version of Lecktor is in way inferior to Anthony Hopkins' much showier characterization. he plays the flrsh munching trick cyclist as if he were a cat burglar waiting for the bail money to come through, not a man imprisoned for life. Joan Allen is warm as Reba the blind woman who befriends Noonan, fellates him after dinner( exquisite amour propre )and strokes a drugged tiger. I remember the reviews for this 1986 movie and cannot recall anyone noting the Blake pattern. Too obvious??