The Beast in Space

Reviewed by fuggy

Poor Sirpa Lane. Through no fault of her own, she was cast in Walerian Borowczyk's infamous The Beast (La Bête). It caused a sensation in film festivals, got banned here and there, and was talked about more than seen. In it, she gets gooped over by a gorilla with a horse's giant penis. 

So, in the care of some particularly ham-handed Italians with none of the money or talent of Borowczyk, Sirpa Lane is subjected to more faux bestiality in The Beast in Space. She's not so much a one-trick pony as the pony's one trick.

The plot follows a spaceship on a mission to a distant planet to bring back the rare element Antalium. Maybe grab some dilithium crystals along the way too, along with some beryllium spheres. Sirpa Lane plays Lieutenant Sondra Richardson, a member of the crew who's been having some premonitions involving being in a forest being chased by some sort of creature (or are they flashbacks to the previous film?) When they reach the planet, the "owner" of the planet, a relentlessly hairy fellow by the name of Onaph, takes a liking to Sondra. There's a whole Star Trek episode's worth of extraneous plot here, so I'll leave you to discover it yourself.

Onaph chases Sondra into the forest, and lo and behold, strips down to reveal his entire lower half is hairy, and he has cloven feet. Oh please.  He's just wearing tights with mangy hair attached to them.  You can see the waistband! Needless to say, the beast in The Beast was a much better creature. More effort was put into his penis and its Peter North-quality pumping action than was put into the design of this whole film. The characters here mention his "horse-like" member, but you never actually see it!

Sirpa, clearly not wearing a patch, has to put up with goatboy thrusting at her in his fuzzy (and possibly hypoallergenic) jammies for at least a quarter of the movie, or so it seems. I hope she didn't end up with a rash. At the same time, he's got his hairy face and beard all up in her grill, and that's not any better. I've seen a lot of really bad making out in softcore (why is that?), but this guy takes the cake. To him, making love involves dragging his tongue across her face and into her mouth every so often. I suppose his direction was to make love to her as a beast would, but I have never seen an animal use their tongue in the process.

I hope she was paid well.

There's not much else here but Sirpa. There's a couple of other female crew members, but they don't have much to do other than make out with other crew members during the scene with Sirpa and the beast, prolonging it even more.

I'm probably not the best one to rate these cheesy old sci-fi movies. I think other people have more taste for this silliness than I do, and some people will love the campiness of many of the scenes, including the pathetic attempt at a sword fight involving knockoffs of light sabres. Me, I just sort of roll my eyes at it. There are better special effects to be found in early Méliès. And rarely, rarely, does sci-fi provide a sexy platform from which to launch a softcore film. Give me Veronica 2030 over this one any day.

Note: I'm not sure how to deal with the male nudity rating. Somehow a brief close-up of what is unmistakably a man's hairy asshole slipped into the picture at 81 minutes in. Do I give some unknown actor the credit for having gone the "extra mile" for this movie, or do I run an extra mile just to get away from having to see such a thing?