Wopsploitation: "The Beast Within"(1981)d/Philippe Mora

One of the most familiar sounds of late summer is the droning mating buzz of the male cicada, sort of a bulky, ugly, winged leafhopper-on-steroids in its final phase, which, in periodical species, doesn't come for up to seventeen years.It's easy to see how one could meld the life cycle of an ugly, loud bug and a teenaged boy coming into adulthood into some sort of shlocky updated fifties-style monster movie with the proper levels of creative flair.Paris-born artist/director Philippe Mora, of "Mad Dog Morgan" fame, attempted just that during the horror heyday of the early eighties, and the finished product, though perplexingly muddled in spots, is a mostly satisfying exercise in B-movie hokum with an unhinged final reel that had audiences screaming, as your humble N(of course, in attendance) can attest to.Mora enlisted the services of FX wizard Tom Burman in bringing the were-cicada to life on the big screen, and through the aid of air bladders and puppetry, Burman transformed this into something like this.I'll let you be the judge on whether or not he succeeded.The cast included the likes of Ronny Cox, Bibi Besch, LQ Jones, Logan Ramsey, and as the lead, then-youngster Paul Clemens, whose mother just happens to be actress Eleanor "The Sound of Music" Parker.MGM released the film as part of its "Midnight Movies" series on dvd a few years back, and you should seek it out if you get the chance. Frankly, you'll probably never see as fine a "rape-crazed were-cicada terrorizes the deep south" movie as this in your lives.

Get yer tits out, get yer tits out, get yer tits out for the hemipterans!
The time is 1964, the place is Nioba, Mississippi(insert strains of 'Dixie' here), where the newlywed McClearys(Ronny Cox, Bibi Besch) have gotten their car stuck in the middle of some dark, desolate woods after husband Eli's ill-fated late night u-turn.He volunteers to walk the three plus miles back to the last filling station they had passed himself, leaving wife Caroline alone in the car.What's the worst that could happen to a young woman alone in a car on the side of a dark southern road through the forest(besides being raped to within an inch of her life by a horny cicada monster, of course)?Eli returns to find her bare-assed n' half buried in some wet leaves, and a makeshift posse puts the lead to local troublemaker Billy Connors for the crime, before the couple leave the whole harrowing experience behind them for a life in Jackson.Unfortunately, seventeen years later they're forced to return to the scene of the crime in search of answers when their teenage son, Michael(Paul Clemens), has suddenly been overtaken by an occult malignancy that has the big city specialists all baffled.Michael, who gets awfully sweaty and pale, has been having livid dreams of an empty old house with something unseen and awful in the cellar.Back in Nioba, they're met with resistance by the town's secretive senior officials: Judge Curwin(Don Gordon), his brother, Edwin(Logan Ramsey), and Dexter Ward(Luke Askew) the town mortician, all treat the McClearys inquiries with the disdain and indifference you'd expect from characters whose names were a silent nod to Howard Phillips himself.One more monster-in-the-cellar dream later, Michael rouses from a sweaty coma, jacks himself an Oldsmobile, and arrives at Edwin's doorstep in sync with a bag of groceries hastily dropped by a delivery boy put off by the old man's blatant homo-pederasty.In a wifebeater and jammies, the nonce fries up some hamburger peppered with boy-hungry innuendo until Michael takes a cue from the buzzing cicadas outside and bites a sizeable chunk out of the old perv's neck(gross),his feet flailing helplessly in some raw hamburger on the floor(more gross).

Michael(Paul Clemens)is about to slip into something more uncomfortable.
While his parents seek out answers, Michael endears himself to Amanda Platt(Katherine Moffat),the angelic teenage daughter of overprotective redneck psycho-dad, Horace(John Dennis Johnston), a man that never met a sass-ending backhander he didn't like, who also happens to be cousin to the Curwin clan.Town boozehound Tow Laws(Ron Soble) relates the story of Billy Connors and his goal of immortality-through-rebirth-every-seventeen-years-via-shapeshifting-into-a-cicada-monster(heard that one a hundred times before, huh?), in between hearty bottle swigs, leading the boy to abruptly cut off a torrid makeout session in the woods with Amanda to embalm Dexter alive at the funeral parlour.The wig-laden judge, panicked by his family's sudden rising mortality rate, admits to chaining up Billy Connors in the cellar of a house in the woods, and that Connors escaped the night the very night the McClearys had their car/rape troubles.It's now apparent that Michael is the pawn in Connors' ploy for revenge from beyond the grave against all conspiritors seventeen years earlier, and as an added bonus, he gets to painfully transform into a cicada monster himself, before the disbelieving eyes of a room full of horrified onlookers (that includes his parents), head bulging and popping before comically inflating like a full-term pregnant womb for minutes that seem to go on forever.He pulls the judge's head off through a jail wall before raping Amanda on what seems like the very same muddy stretch of road he was conceived on himself, ensuring the rape-revenge cycle will continue after he's eaten some post-rape shotgun-induced death...or would continue if enough interest generated a sequel at that point.It didn't.

Awww, ma, manburgers for dinner, again?
Besides the aforementioned Hopper vehicle Morgan, Mora also handled two Howling sequels, which apart from screen time involving Sybill Danning's magnificent bra-pups in the second, were pretty forgettable, and Communion, the Christopher Walken-gets-anally-probed alien abduction movie.Cox, as you should well know by now, has been in films like Deliverance(1972), Total Recall(1992), and everything in-between over his long, successful career.Clemens, who's done countless television roles over the years, most recently appeared in the colorfully titled, The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficent Weapon, in 2008.The feature attraction here has to be the transformation effects as imagined by Burman and company; still entertaining and eye-catching despite not having aged very well over the years.Overall, this one's a good old fashioned monster movie with some potent eighties flair that you'd do well to see for yourselves.On the scale, Within climbs out of the mud and up a tree, where its proboscis siphons out two big ones.Check it out!