To add a layer of irony, the entire dreamviolation is scored to a dainty repeating harpsichord fugue by Scarlatti.

For the exotic and the eroticand the downright weirdhad always been part of Borowczyks cinematic universe.Cathal Tohill Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales: European Sex Horror Movies, 1956-1984.

The original Beast is the segment that now appears as Lucys dream.

Being as circumspect and polite as possible, well simply say that it has to do with the titular creatures, ahem, equipment.

Scrub your eyes though you may, you cant unsee these things, so beware.

If you can make it through the equine porn scene that opens the film, you should be fine.

Not surprisingly, most of The Beast s promotional material has focused on Sirpa Lanes stunned face, framed by a powdered wig, as she gazes in shock at the same images that will be indelibly stained in your memory).

Some movies become weird because of certain confluences of incompetencies.

And then there are movies like The Beast a nugget of explicit (if simulated) bestiality porn wrapped in a nuptial drawing room drama, made by a director on the cusp of art house stardom who seems intent on throwing it all away as dramatically as possiblethat are weird simply because, if not for the evidence of your own eyes, you could not believe that they exist.

After a quote from Voltaire (worried dreams are but a passing folly) accompanied by the sounds of clomping hooves and anxious whinnying, we are treated to a shot of a massive, erect stallion phallus, soon followed by a closeup of a twitching mare vagina.

Then, in a four minute stretch with only horseshoes on cobblestones and the snorting of flared steed nostrils for a soundtrack, we absorb the particulars of equine lovemaking (foreplay and all) in more graphic detail than most of us outside the racehorse breeding industry would ever care to know.

Their equipment, and their mechanics, are so close to our own; yet we are instinctively repulsed, while at the same time forced to concede that the entire procedure is wholly natural.

The horse-humping scene prepares us for an upcoming exploration of eroticism that is, to say the least, a little bit askew.

The Beast s central plot involves marriage, which is an invention designed to cheat nature and divert the sexual impulse into a safe and controlled channel.

Civilization puts arbitrary barriers, enforced by the Church in its role as monopoly provider of matrimony, in his way.

Mathurin must be baptized, a task his father has neglected since the boys birth, and a will specifies that the marriage must be performed by a particular prelate with whom the family has had a falling out.

Inside the chateau, society seems to be set up to prevent people from getting laid.

Mathurins sister, Clarisse, tries to sate her lust with the black servant, Ifanya taboo relationship on grounds of both class and race, though not species.

He is continually called away in medias coitus, leaving her to satisfy herself on the bed rail.

Lucy Broadhurst, the bride to be, finds her virginal imagination constantly titillated by the sight of copulating horses, and by the bestiality sketches she finds stashed in various places around the home; but shes stuck masturbating with a rose, and only finds consummation in her dreams.

The only person in the chateau who may actually be getting any regularly is the local priest, who has brought two altar boys along with him for companionship on his trip.

Lucy, with her wide-eyed eagerness to take in anything sexual, to the humiliation of her prim aunt, makes for an odd sort of comic heroine.

But the subdued humor rises to another level when the Beast himself pops up in a dream, with his absurdly enormous oozing phallus (that seems carefully modeled on the horsehood of the steed we saw earlier).

When he catches her, he will well, delicacy and the desire to preserve some kind of mystery prevents us from describing the activities in detail, but lets just hint that they are very kinky, and very wet.

Sirpa Lane In The Beast