10 More Times The Movie Killer Was Hiding In Plain Sight

This is an utterly unique French film that succeeds in not only in combining sassy period drama, western, monster horror and a complex murder mystery, it also has some impressive post-Matrix style martial arts.

Grégoire de Fronsac, an enlightened adventurer recently returned from colonial America, investigates a series of brutal murders in a remote rural French town, where peasants are being torn limb from limb by the 'Beast of Gevaudan.'

The real villain of the piece, however, is Jean-François, an aristocratic psychopath with a 15 foot pet lion wearing plate amour, bred during his educational sojourn in Africa. The brutalised animal was then set loose upon a superstitious population by both Crown and Papacy (Monica Bellucci plays a Vatican spy), fearing the spread of enlightened thinkers.

All the clues come in the first hour of the movie - Jean-François boasts to Fronsac that he has "traveled a great deal... I am also a hunter," alluding to the origins of the 'beast' in Africa. Jean-François' motivation becomes clear when Fronsac, Marianne and Mani find a series of crumbling ecclesiastical ruins. Marianne explains that the area was once a Templar stronghold, rife with 'heretics,' something the fanatical Jean-François cannot allow to return.

That's the why, so what about the who? Fronsac pulls a metal claw from a victim, observing; "No animal has fangs of steel." There is a man behind this armoured monster and his suspicions are confirmed when the beast spares Marianne - it can smell her brother, it's master and the real villain, Jean-François.