In Search Of The Great Beast 666 DVD Review

Aleister Crowley has been immortalized by his writings, his legend, and an Ozzy Osbourne song! Now he has In Search of the Great Beast 666, a documentary about the ‘wickedest man in the world’. In his lifetime he drove people to suicide, watched as an acolyte died from a combination of self-inflicted wounds and bizarre rituals, and abandoned wives or drove them insane with his sadomasochistic behavior, so this DVD can hardly be considered the greatest of his abominations! The creators of In Search of the Great Beast have however managed to make this retelling of the life of a man devoted to depravity into something this is both unintentionally comic and often tedious. The story of the boy who, from a fundamentalist Christian background, became one of the most famous practitioners of the occult is told both in voice-over (by the suitably serious-sounding Joss Ackland) and re-enactments. Various people who were significant to Crowley’s life-long mission to explore the ‘other’ are played by actors, providing interview-like responses straight to camera. The story moves chronologically, from Crowley’s birth to his death, taking in the occult organizations that he founded, his drug addiction, sex-based magic rituals, masochism and bisexuality. How can you go wrong with material like that? The first mistake is with the actors chosen to play the roles. Crowley, as played by Thomas Bewley, gets the best deal. He is somewhat camp, but certainly in better shape than the drug-addled reality of the man at that time in his life. At the other end of the spectrum is the wife of a man who died under Crowley’s ‘tutorage’, Betty May (Magda Rodreiguez). Her slow monotone might have been an attempt at confused grief, but the impression it leaves is, and I’m being charitable here, that she might be drugged. It should be somber, instead it treads a fine line between silly and tedious. Truly the worst performance I’ve seen in a long time, and I get to see some pretty bad ones! The second problem is the disparity in the level of attention that is lavished upon the different sections of Crowley’s history. Parts of his early life get a careful examination, presumably because they are amongst the most salacious. Later events, such as the oft-rumored relationship between Crowley and the Bush (yes, THE Bush) family, are quickly brushed over as if there is no disputing the ‘facts’ presented. His rumored involvement in World War II, and the possibility that he was working as a spy, also fly past. The end of the DVD has the feeling of an exam essay, where the student has lost track of the time and must get everything he or she knows onto the paper in the last few minutes. The audio is generally good, although occasionally the quality drops inexplicably, as though someone had stuffed a pillow between Ackland and his microphone. The video, though clear, suffers from the continual use of a ‘cracked mud’ overlay, breaking up the images to give them, I assume, a ‘satanic’ feel. What it ends up doing is rendering the photographs unclear and filled with distracting noise. Speaking of the photographs, some form of titling would have been useful, as there is nothing to differentiate period shots from recreated ones. It is impossible to tell which is which and so you can trust none of them. A documentary that you can’t trust isn’t much of a documentary at all. If you want to learn about the legend and history of ‘The Great Beast 666’ then I suggest you look elsewhere. If you are hard of hearing you’ll have to, as once again we have a DVD with no subtitles. I’d knock off my usual star for this, but given that the DVD is utterly bereft of extras (unless you count chapter breaks, and I certainly don’t) that would give it a negative score, and that is sadly impossible. Given the subject, I find it hard to believe that nothing could have been found. The website linked to the film (which has existed since its 2007 UK release) contains little more than trailers and cast photos.