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The Beast and the Vixens
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Dark Force Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (7th August 2025). |
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The Film
 Ann (Trick or Treats's Jacqueline Giroux) and Mary (Supervixens' Uschi Digard) use the excuse about writing a term paper on primitive man as an excuse to get away to the countryside with a stay at a cabin in the Pacific Northwest. Not only is Bigfoot prowling around and abducting girls – among them Alice Goodbody's Colleen Brennan aka "Sharon Kelly", Prison Girls' Tracy Handfuss, and A Scream in the Streets' Sandy Carey – that he keeps in his cave, ex-con Pete and his buddy French (Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman's Marius Mazmanian) have reunited after the former's seven year prison sentence to split the cache of precious coins they stole and hid under the floorboards of a cabin. French reveals that the coins have gone missing but he spotted one of them around the neck of hippie Becky (Blue Money's Susan Westcott) who along with friends Hank, Mark, and Sarah are squatting in a boy's summer camp in the off season and making money by selling crafts. Ann and Mary go exploring an old mill and are scared off by a hermit and run into the hippies, creating some sexual tension between the couples just as Pete and French strike, and it may take a horny cryptid to save the day. One of the rare subgenre of Sasquatch sexploitation films – along with the The Geek which was released in hardcore and softcore versions, as well as at a stretch the eighties gore film Night of the Demon which has a few sex scenes and a rape by Bigfoot in its backstory – The Beast and the Vixens is structured in a way that makes obvious the staggered shooting schedule and decisions made about how explicit the film was to be midway without consideration to what came before. Despite being embodied by the likes of sexploitation legend Digard and exploitation regular Giroux – who both appeared in regular exploitation films and softcore sex films as well as hardcore films but never did hardcore scenes – Ann and Mary recede into the background for much of the film after being introduced and the film instead introduces a bunch of other characters who encounter the beast whose motives seem to change from scene to scene, terrorizing and killing a pimp and his hooker who are getting away from the city to avoid being busted during a crackdown, and then abducting, trapping, clothing, and feeding a sunbather, half of a motoring couple (Carey and Swinger's Massacre's Philip Luther) who strip down in the middle of a clearing to have sex on a picnic blanket, and go-go dancer while leaving a rare coin for the hippies each time they leave food out for what they believe is a hermit. The editing does nothing to smooth over the patchwork assembly – even taking into account that the presentation on this disc is a bastardized version and is missing footage – and the library music is often tonally at odds with the footage with some fifties sitcom-type scoring during the sequence in which both the hermit and the beast spy on Ann and Mary (some bouncing by the beast suggests he may be masturbating but it is unclear elsewhere if he has any sexual interest in his captives). The criminal subplot takes forever to pay off with the crooks being more of a threat than the beast, and there is no payoff to the escape plan of the girls in the cave with the finale focusing on Ann, Mary, the hippies, and a helpful woodsman. The sex scenes range from choppy – a lesbian scene between Ann and Mary dissolves to the next day as soon as it begins , a dream sequence featuring a nude duel between Ann and Sarah feels incomplete, and the Carey/Luther scene that was considerably longer than seen in this presentation but nowhere near as interminable as the sex scene between Sarah and Hank that takes up a chunk of the third act. While many of the cast and production credits are likely pseudonyms, the director is likely the credited Ray Nadeau who worked in the editorial departments of several Hollywood studios and did the post-production restructuring of Willard Huyck's and Gloria Katz's Messiah of Evil, edited the sexploitation flick The Love Garden, and served as assistant director and associate producer on Fangs while producer Arthur A. Jacobs had produced Richard E. Cunha's early efforts Giant from the Unknown and She Demons, and second unit director Ewing Miles Brown owned a small studio that hosted low budget exploitation including a few films by Al Adamson – with the Blood of Dracula's Castle dungeon set popping up in a couple sexploitation films – and hardcore films from the early sixties onwards and had small roles in some of the films not only appears onscreen to provide an introduction to Bigfood sightings but likely also directed some of the film's additional scenes (at least those shot in studio). Beast and the Vixens is certainly the lesser of the Sasquatch sexploitation entries but nonetheless interesting for its cast and how it barely comes together behind the scenes. 
Video
Given regional releases in 1974, The Beast and the Vixens was shot in both sexploitation and horror versions and primarily played theatrically in the latter form. A big box VHS release appeared in the early eighties from Applause Productions Inc. that ran only sixty-six minutes and turned out to be a trimmed down cut of the sexploitation version. Dark Force's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.33:1 pillarboxed fullscreen Blu-ray comes from a composite of 35mm sources for the horror cut and a reel of the sex version and possibly other print materials – see the commentary for more information below – but this version is missing footage included on the aforementioned Applause VHS which featured even less of the Digard/Giroux scene but featured a longer, more explicit version of the Carey/Luther sex scene, a scene of the beast pawing unconscious Carey's nude body, and the skinny-dipping scene between Ann, Mary, and Hank that is entirely offscreen on the Blu-ray. the loss of footage on the Blu-ray in these cases is due to the fact that the only film source is the horror version which kept some of the sex but trimmed it down. The Sarah/Mark sex scene is from the one complete reel of the sex version since it is identical to the tape version. The scene of French calling Pete is present in both versions but the scene of the pair actually meeting up is missing from the tape so they just appear next to terrorize Ann, Mary, and the hippies during the third act. Given that the Blu-ray is a composite of a film shot on 16mm reversal film and blown-up with no reflectors to fill the shadows in bright sunlight and little lighting in the night-for-night shots, and the reels have been through many projectors and suffered damage including stains, scratches, and emulsion digs, the presentation is not optimal and probably never was even when the materials were freshly struck; however, it is one of the rougher transfer out of the rarer titles in Dark Force's line so set your expectations low. 
Audio
The sole audio option is a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track that sounds cleaner than the film looks. The audio recording and mixing has it limits with French's scene at a telephone booth sounding like he should be the person on the other side of the line, a mix of production audio and post-dubbing – Pete seems like has been dubbed even in scenes where the other actors are recorded live – sound design is spare, and the library scoring sound relatively clean along with Hank's folk song. There are no subtitle options. 
Extras
The sole extra is an what was supposed to be an audio commentary by Vinegar Syndrome's Joe Rubin, Severin Films' David Gregory and Jim Kunz, and Demon Dave but the latter is running late and does not turn up until twenty-seven minutes in during which Gregory has had to make an appointment. Gregory discusses the career of Ewing Miles Brown – who he interviewed for the Adamson documentary Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson – and Rubin reveals that he was in Montreal when Brown's estate had an auction at the studio and called Gregory to check out what was more of a rummage of Brown's storage where they had to dig past plenty of old studio equipment to find film reels and ended up with three reels of The Beast and the Vixens and found more the next day after others had cleared more away (along with the original camera negative for The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals which Severin released on Blu-ray last year). Gregory was according to Rubin "distraught" that neither complete version could be assembled from what was available for a Blu-ray from Severin so he ended up selling the materials to Dark Force's Demon Dave. Rubin tries to pinpoint what belongs to what versions, also noting that a complete attack sequence from the horror version is missing from the materials, noting the start and stop dates of some of the softcore and hardcore performers' careers in the context of the film's production and conjectures the degree of Brown's involvement. He does note that the film started out as sexploitation and the horror version came afterward, but that Brown's "second unit" footage came after the original sexploitation shoot. The tone shifts when Demon Dave shows up from dealing with Lamborghini troubles and brings along with him actor Jack La Rue Jr. (from Crypt of the Living Dead's stateside additions) with some rehashing and some digressions about Rubin's "negative" reputation and some juvenile reactions to the film's display of full frontal male nudity during the third reel sex scene but fans of the more chaotic Code Red and earlier Dark Force commentaries will probably be entertained while others may find the first half-hour most informative. 
Overall
Beast and the Vixens is certainly the lesser of the Sasquatch sexploitation entries but nonetheless interesting for its cast and how it barely comes together behind the scenes.
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