Beast

Beast - 2009 - Germany - Horror/Werewolf/Splatter

Timo Rose is a German director known for his gore flicks and is often put in the same category as schlocky gore directors like Olaf Ittenbach and Andreas Schnaas (who I am particularialy fond of).  This is the first film by him that I have seen and I was excited to see what he had to offer.  Unfortunately, I was severely disappointed with this one.

Beast starts off rather promising.  A giant werewolf tears several people to shreds deep within the woods of Germany.  The gore effects look great and the kills come at a great pace.  After the opening, however, it quickly begins to slide downhill.

The rest of the film moves at a sluggish pace.  The characters (most of which speak English) are vastly dull and uninteresting.  They spew curse words entirely too much and their dialogue is awful and boring.  There's a couple half-assed attempts at humor but it all falls flat,  The acting isn't terrible...yet its not much good either.  I would have preferred awful, cheesy acting to these semi-mediocre, uninspired performances.  The plot meanders on for the next hour or so with no signs of any werewolves and barely any action to speak of.  The story takes a turn towards a massively boring criminal/hostage situation subplot. 

Beast is also ugly.  Many of the shots are grainy and over exposed, an aspect in B-movies that I normally gladly ignore, but since this film tried to take itself so seriously its pretty hard not to notice it.  Beast also takes to the distracting, schizo-type editing style in which random images are rapidly flashed during scenes.  Its a hack horror movie cliche that I've seen all to often, and it's annoying quite frankly. Epileptics beware.

The best parts of this film are the FX.  Timo Rose does a lot of his own gore effects and they looks pretty good.  There's also a couple werewolf transformation scenes that were surprisingly impressive, save the occasional obvious CGI.

Overall, Beast its a very dull movie.  It claims to be a gore movie but besides the beginning and a few kills at the end there really isn't all that much.   The plot cant save it either, and neither can its weak attempts at humor and lame characters.  I'd be willing to give Timo Rose another chance, as I've heard K7B Mutation is pretty great, (I cant find a DVD anywhere.  if you can find it for a decent price let me know!) but I wont be watching this one again any time soon, and I wouldn't recommend it either.


Plot - 2.5/10
Action - 3/10
Acting - 6/10
Blood n' Guts - 7/10
OVERALL - 4/10


Good lookin' head wound.

Boring banter between boring characters

 A badly choreographed, overexposed fight scene.

 Held hostage.