As Bill Warren has remarked elsewhere, the thing that distinguishes Corman's products (I have a hard time calling them "movies") is a spark of intelligence and inventiveness in the initial conception of whatever the movie is supposed to be about. You can almost always tell a Corman flick from other cheaply made exploitation flicks because there is just enough strength and imagination somewhere in the screenplay, and one or two of the actors are just barely good enough, to keep you from burning the print and assaulting the person who showed it to you.
That's certainly the case here. The basic plot, about a disembodied alien life force beginning its takeover of Earth in an isolated, lonely desert community and taking over the minds of the lower beasts and birds to serve as the vessel of its wishes...well, it's an intriguing idea. However, the execution this time around is bad enough to make Larry Buchanan and Herschel Gordon feel good.
The hero is a good looking (if somewhat stout) fellow with a heavy, halting, lugubrious delivery of every...damn...line...of...dialog that wears out its welcome in the first 10 minutes. The wife and the daughter are even worse - neither of them can maintain a consistent screen persona for more than 30 seconds at a time. These short-comings could have been corrected by a competent director, or maybe one with a budget that allowed for a couple of retakes, but that didn't happen here, so it's like watching community theater actors in a town of 600 struggling with a script written by a 14 year old who saw an Pinter play once.
My fried Dave Sindelar, of sci-film.org fame, put it very well - it's as if they brought 70 minutes of film to the editors and asked them to create a 75 minute film. The animal attacks that might have made this interesting are unconvincing cuts between shots of animals posing and actors reacting in fright...it's painfully obvious that no one involved with this thing knew how to wrangle animals or stage a fight scene (the one between a young, unfortunate Dick Sergant and the mute farm hand wouldn't pass muster in a high school play). There are endless shots of actors running off into the distance. There are a couple of disconcerting sequences where the background music takes over in scenes where there should have been some dialog, and it's heavy symphonic stuff that doesn't really match the on screen action.
Mostly, it's just a bust. Having seen it once, I can see where "American Releasing Corporation" (soon to become AIP) developed its house style, so there might be a little historical value to it...but otherwise, don't expect much from "Beast".
