SEARCH FOR THE BEAST
By Derrick Ferguson
Based on the screenplay by Rick
Montana
Pro Se Press
169 pages
This is a book we’ve been most
anxious to get our hands on for multiple reasons. So here’s a question for all
of you. What do you get when you adapt an hour long B horror movie into a full
length novel? Well, if the writer chosen to do the novelization is competent,
you’ll most likely get an okay prose version of the flick. Whereas if your
writer is one of the finest, most capable authors in New Pulp today, what you’ll
end up with is something a whole lot more intense, suspenseful and exciting
than the actual source material.
Now as to that latter, we have not
seen writer/director Rick Montana’s little movie and are solely referring to
the extremely negative comments on its Amazon page. Ouch. We don’t generally
mind B movies, but those with a modicum of fun attached to them. Now back to
book review.
One of the first things Ferguson does is shifts the tale’s setting from the
backwoods of Alabama to the northwest Florida swamps, which is
a much more logical setting if the entire theme of your narrative centers
around the hunt for a bigfoot type creature called the Beast. The protagonist
is a former Army Ranger turned archeologist named David Stone who is quite
familiar with both the Beast and his Okaloosa wilderness habitat. When the son
of the area’s richest men goes missing along with his girlfriend, the father
hires Stone to go and find him. He also sends along a squad of ex-military
mercenaries led by one Jim Steele. Stone is rightly suspicious of Steele and
his team, sensing early on that their agendas are not the same. Unfortunately Stone has made the mistake of
bringing along an undergraduate student, Wendy, and he soon fears he has not
only endangered his own life but hers as
well.
No sooner does the group get settled
into their bivouac camp, then the Beast appears and savagely murders one of Steele’s
men. At the same time another group of mysterious hunters materializes and
Steele is convinced they are chasing after the same illegal cache he has been
hired to find and destroy. All the while Dr. Stone and Wendy are caught up in
the crossfire doing their best to survive both the human killers and the
supernatural Beast.
Ferguson imbues what is a fairly standard plot
with so much verve and energy, this reviewer became totally caught up in the
tale; willingly forgetting how outlandish the plot is. He is a masterful writer
and gives these characters tons more depth and substance than any B movie could
ever offer. Maybe some night we’ll get to see the film on cable, till then, we’re
in no hurry to do so. Having read the book, we’re pretty sure we came out ahead
on this one.
2 comments:
Thank you so much for the glowing review, Ron! I like to think of SEARCH FOR THE BEAST as my homage to 1980s Grindhouse and from what I've heard/read from those who have read the book, I was moderately successful. My deepest appreciation and thanks go to Tommy Hancock who brought the project to me and to the film's writer/star/director Rick Montana who graciously allowed me to go nuts and re-interpret his movie any way I liked.
Actually, Ron, there are many sightings of Bigfoot type creatures in the Carolinas, including the so-called Lizard Man of Bishopville.
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