Flesh for the Beast (2003)

Good concept, poorly executed.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

With so many lame, low-budget horror DVDs misleading fans through the use of salacious cover-art, carefully selected stills, and provocative blurb, it's nice to find one that finally makes good on its packaging's promise of copious amounts of sex and violence.Flesh for the Beast is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination—the story is clichéd nonsense, the acting is average at best (even from its two 'names', Caroline Munro and Aldo Sambrell), and the direction is uninspired—but it does feature enough gratuitous full-frontal female nudity and gruesome gore to satisfy most depraved viewers' lust for flesh, whether it be for the pink and supple kind, or the ragged, red and bloody variety.As in Armand Weston's The Nesting (1981), Roberta Findlay's Blood Sisters (1987) and Lucio Fulci's The Ghosts of Sodom (1988), writer/director Terry West's Flesh for the Beast is set in a building that used to be a brothel, and which is now the centre of terrifying paranormal activity. The owner of the building, John Stoker (Sergio Jones) hires a team of parapsychologists to try and cleanse the property, but one-by-one the visitors are seduced and killed by the evil succubi that dwell there.This rather cheesy set-up might not be that original, but it does allow for plenty of sleazy shenanigans, with the demons first appearing as randy young women in order to shag their intended victims, before eventually turning nasty and yanking out their internal organs and generally making a lot of mess: during the course of the film, Jones is absolutely drenched in the red stuff, one guy pukes up his guts (literally), the naked ladies playing the succubi writhe enthusiastically in a pool of blood and assorted organs, and even Caroline Munro joins in the bloody fun, having her throat cut at the end of her one brief scene.Having seen a ton of low-budget horror way worse than Flesh for the Beast, I am genuinely surprised by the mostly disparaging comments here on IMDb. Don't people like honest-to-goodness sex and blood in their horror anymore?

A team of parapsychologists is invited by John Stoker (Sergio Jones) to research the evil Fischer Manor, an ancient brothel where the owner Alfred Fischer (Aldo Sanbrell) was a gigolo that practiced black witchcraft. While investigating, the men are attacked by flesh-eater succubus and the psychic Erin Cooper (Jane Scarlett) seeks a powerful amulet for John Stoker. When they meet the trio of succubus, John discovers a lethal secret."Flesh for the Beast" is a disappointing B-movie with a different type of succubus that eat flesh, instead of drawing energy from the men during the intercourse; in this regard, the Canadian "La Peau Blanche" is better and better. In "Flesh for the Beast", the characters are not well-developed; the acting is weak and the story uses the all the clichés of "haunted house movies", with a group of psychics gathered to investigate supernatural phenomena in an old house. The best parts are the gore and erotic attack of the naked succubus, but they are not enough to make this flick satisfactory. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): "Carne Para o Demônio" ("Flesh for the Devil")

The first sign of trouble for "Flesh for the Beast" is that the DVD case (which is otherwise very nice) advertises most prominently music by Buckethead. Nothing against Buckethead, but since when do people watch horror films for their music? Good or bad (I honestly can't remember), the music does nothing to save this poor excuse for a horror film, which is in fact porn. Sure, there's blood, zombies, and cannibalism, but the central focus of the film is sex and female nudity.The plot concerns a crew of ghost busters hired by a rich man to investigate his haunted mansion. A video crew accompanies them for what I guess was supposed to be comic relief. Soon succubi show up and promptly take their clothes off to bed down with the male cast members before killing them. Each killing is preceded by a different succubus related sex fantasy. After the killings we are "treated" to a loooong sequence of the unfettered girl-monsters playing around in the blood. Anybody who sits this far into the movie won't be able to call it horror with a straight face.And no, it isn't at least funny instead of being scary. This movie is a thorough going piece of crap that expects you to take each pointless scene seriously. It's all especially disappointing because the first scene makes it look like "Flesh for the Beast" might be a real horror film. Unfortunately, like the stud arriving to fix the cable, this is only a set-up.There are a couple of twists that render the plot ridiculous just to reminder the renter/buyer of this film they've been cheated. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece here or even in interesting failure, but if I'd known this was a movie exclusively about hetero-porn I'd never have bothered with it. I wish distributors (this means you Shriek Show) would mark movies like this with a soft-core tag accompanying whichever genre their movie is pretending to be. The scariest thing about this movie is the DVD art which successfully hides nearly any trace of the film's pornographic content.

Boy, am I in the minority on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed this film and consider it to a very fine throwback to the gloriously down'n'dirty European exploitation horror films of the 70's. First off, I appreciated Terry West's moody and visceral approach to banging out a horror film. There's very little CGI (one quick morphing scene), the editing wasn't done in that hateful rapid-fire MTV music video style, and the digital photography was a tad rough, but overall quite spooky and effective. Moreover, the gore was plentiful and suitably sickening (splatter highlights include one guy vomiting forth his entire intestinal tract and another dude being literally drenched with a bucket of grue). The fact that the story was told with utmost seriousness and an increasingly all-too-rare sense of conviction (thankfully there's no dreadful "Scream"-like" "it's-only-just-a-movie-folks" self-consciousness to be found here) was a substantial plus. Okay, I'll admit that the acting was strictly hit-or-miss and the dialogue tended to be clunky. Furthermore, I personally found the much-derided sex scenes to be quite steamy and the much-maligned actresses to be very attractive (it's nice to see a recent horror film with equally ample amounts of both sex and violence that are prominently presented throughout with extremely graphic and unwavering explicitness). The key aspect of this movie which for me makes it a true winner is the fact that not a single woman gets killed in it (with the notable exception of Caroline Munro, who gets offed in a flashback by Aldo Sambrell). For once it's only the guys who get gruesomely bagged left and right. On in interesting note, almost every last man gets offed after having sex with one of the succubi, thereby illustrating how sex can be used to manipulate men into a vulnerable position. It's this gender role reversal that makes "Flesh for the Beast" so refreshing. Usually just woman are killed for being openly sexual; here the tables are turned on the men for a change. (This is probably why a lot of folks don't like this movie.) And this pic even comes complete with a profound statement about how such fundamental human weaknesses as lust and greed feed evil and keep it thriving for perpetuity. It's articulated in a throwaway line at the very end, but it's a spot-on astute statement that I give the movie additional props for saying.