he Fischer house is the holy grail for parapsychologists. A mansion-cum-brothel once owned by the notorious turn-of-the-century occultist Alfred Fischer, the place once drew clients hungry for pleasures of the flesh and glimpses into the world beyond. But since its proprietor's mysterious disappearance, countless tales of maddening hauntings and sinister deaths have flowed from its halls. That's why the mansion's new owner, John Stoker (Jones), has called in a team of paranormal investigators to help him rid the place of its evil aura.
Something seems even fishier than usual, however, to the team's leader, Ted Sturgeon (Beasly Jr.). Stoker may claim he carries a handgun around to scare off the mental patients that occasionally wander onto the property (the mansion having been an asylum at one point, as well), but that doesn't make Sturgeon any more comfortable with it. Professional pride and the need for cash get the better of him and his crew, though, and the investigators set out to explore the vast house.
As the mysteries of the mansion menace (in the form of zombies) and seduce (in the form of succubi) various members of the team, Stoker accompanies the group's psychic, Erin Cooper (Scarlett), around the myriad abandoned rooms. What Stoker discovers is that Erin is the most powerful and sensitive mind to have entered the house. What Erin discovers is that this sinister place's past is somehow linked to a powerful amulet, now lost, that Fischer once possessed. If only she could find some of her teammates to help her make sense of everything she's seeing ...
A breast-filled Beast of a burden
Flesh for the Beast suffers not only from a number of the downsides of low-budget, independent horror movie production, but also from a bit of an identity crisis. On the one hand, it appears to acknowledge and revel in its own trashy hokiness, but on the other seems to have pretensions of being a smarter or more artistic film. As it develops, the movie also seems unable to decide whether it wants to be a sexploitative horror film or a horror-themed soft-core porno.
The story is far from completely mindless, but it's also far from original or terribly compelling. There is the occasional interesting plot twist and a few moments of potent, atmospheric lighting, cinematography and direction, but these are all few and far between. The acting is similarly uneven, the cast's performances ranging from passably entertaining (there are a couple of scenes with some decent comic relief) to painfully bad. Even at a slim 90 minutes, Flesh for the Beast feels much longer than it is, its simple narrative dragging in a number of scenes that develop like bad improv.
Movies of all kinds embody fantasies and fears of all sorts, and few would argue that the horror genre most often caters to males, but the fantasies and fears played out in this horror film are of such a simplistically and even obnoxiously masculine sort that they add up to be more bothersome and tiresome than anything else. In its numerous encounters with the hyper-sexed, castrating succubi and its visual groping and psychic violating of the innocent girl (embodied in and only nominally complicated by the character of Erin), Flesh for the Beast feels threadbare, even anachronistic (to say nothing of misogynistic). The provocative tension that exists in many horror films today between women as sexual beings and women as powerful controllers of their own destiny is here, in writer-director Terry M. West's tale, reduced to a simple, vexing contradiction.
