Worthy successor to Detour, The Hitch-Hiker and The Hitcher .....

Dear Victor Salva,

I first watched The Nature of the Beast in the mid-90s. A few years after cable TV had become an important part of Indian life. It was called Bad Company back then. My father liked the film so much that he recorded it on a video cassette. I decided to re-watch it yesterday and I am glad to inform you that it has aged very well. You should think about releasing the film on Blu Ray.

Eric Roberts and Lance Henriksen must be two of the most underrated and underused actors in American cinema. That these two actors hardly got to do any good roles during the peak of their powers reflects the sorry state of American cinema in the last twenty years. In Nature of the Beast, they play two men on the run dangerously attracted to each other. Eric Robert's speech about how everyone is pretending and that there is nothing but emptiness at the center and that we are all beasts at the end of the day was very effective. I liked the offbeat characters that populated the American small towns that Roberts and Henrisken drove through. The point of view shots of deserted American highways are always a pleasure to look at. The ending was a bit of a letdown even though I never saw it coming. The film's basic plot might have been borrowed from films like Detour (1945), The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and The Hitcher (1986). The fact that the two characters are bound together by very different crimes makes The Nature of the Beast slightly different from its predecessors. Great effort, Victor. I will check out some of your other films.

Best Regards,
Pimpin.

(7/10)