Beast

Trust the lugubrious mind meld of director Michael Raven and writer David Aaron Clark, who have both taken the currently hot Gothic chic to the very depths of darkness and despair in their respective work, to come up with an update of the timeless tale of Beauty and the Beast with the emphasis as the title suggests definitely on the latter. In past porn renditions, Warren Evans called his 1981 version BEAUTY with Loni Sanders in the title role and perpetual bad boy Jamie Gillis more ill-mannered teddy bear than outright monstrosity while Paul Thomas combined imagery taken ad verbatim from Jean Cocteau's art-house classic with the atmosphere of a Christmas pantomime in his BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 1 & 2. Always at his best with macabre material (as UNDERWORLD and WATCHERS attest), Raven simply takes the fairytale as his cue for another tour through Ravenville, a sort of depraved Gotham City where moans of pleasure and cries of anguish are virtually impossible to tell apart, where night never seems to turn into day.

This version's Beast is a wealthy disfigured recluse played to absolute perfection by Anthony Crane delivering as fine a thespian turn as one is ever likely to encounter in an adult film. Crane is totally obsessed with a mysterious dominatrix who goes by the name of Beauty (Jessica Drake) who turns out to harbor extreme insecurities of her own, as pointed out by her live-in female lover Ava Vincent (formerly Jewel Valmont) who begrudgingly accepts but does not approve of her girlfriend's nocturnal activities. Utterly submitting himself to Drake's every whim, Crane comes to see himself erroneously as both benefactor and ultimate savior of his wayward Mistress, disregarding the fact that she wants nor needs this kind of redemption.

I have had my misgivings in the past about many people's apparently over-abundant admiration for Michael Raven who too often seemed to favor style over substance with the by now customary rock video aesthetic of upmarket porn. Not so with BEAST, one of the most devastating dirty movies in recent memory which offers no escape route out of its exceptionally downbeat view of life and love in the budding new millennium. Characters are either well-meaning if clueless (Beast, Beauty's lover) or unabashedly self-serving (Beauty, her vicious pimp portrayed indelibly by director Robby D. as well as most everybody else here) and experience does nothing to change them unless it's for the worse. The blazing ending (which I'm not about to reveal here) destroys every single bit of hope any of the characters may have had to begin with but it makes perfect sense as a six feet under conclusion to a tale that was considerably less than cheerful at the outset. To put it bluntly, Raven will tear many an unsuspecting viewer a new rectum with this baby. But he does so with immaculate style and cinematic finesse, composing artful images with the help of ace cinematographer Jack Remy that'll etch themselves in your mind's eye. Some of the things you see and hear will undoubtedly shock you (even this jaded old porn hound flinched on a couple of occasions), some will certainly turn you on though you may hesitate to admit to it. The sex is raw and brutal but consensual (with a single romantic fantasy sequence near film's end providing perfect contrast), punctuated by a largely heavy metal soundtrack, not my personal music of choice yet perfectly suited to Raven's ends.

While Raven hits an all time high stylistically, none of this darker than thou stuff would work if it weren't for the sheer excellence of the performances. Though pretty enough, Jessica Drake never registered very strongly with me in past efforts. She may not be the most accomplished actress ever to hit even blue movies but somehow she is casting perfection as the cold-hearted but extremely alluring dominatrix, a figure further shrouded in mystery through Raven's elliptic storytelling methods jumping backward and forward in time.