THE BEAST

Walerian Borowczyk's most notorious film wildly re-works BEAUTY AND THE BEAST into an adult fairy tale that parodies pornographic tropes and assaults all notions of "good taste." Bestial dreams interrupt the plans of a French aristocrat to marry off Mathurin, his deformed son, to Lucy, a horny American heiress. Yet Mathurin seems more interested in his horses than in his bride-to-be. When Lucy discovers the story of an 18th-century ancestor copulating with the titular beast, it sparks to life one of the most outrageous dream sequences in cinema history. A huge hit in France that was extensively censored and banned all over the world, THE BEAST (aka LA BÊTE) broke new ground in sexual explicitness and remains a truly startling experience today.