Pros: Great acting from Patterson and the make up effects are top notch.
Cons: Couldn't really make sense of anything, but I eventually gave up on that.
The Bottom Line: It's an interesting flick, with a lot of rampant symbolism, some of it obvious, but most of it rather confusing. It's a rather entertaining wolf flick.
"The Company of Wolves" is probably the better of the "updated 'Little Red Ridinghood'" movies, and it's a little bit odd that there are enough films to make that a separate category. I like how this movie has a real folklore feel to some of it, with dark pathways, gloomy trees, and bushes with a shade of brown and thorns that will tear a hole right through your pockets. Also, nothing in this movie makes any sense whatsoever. This is a world where it is perfectly normal for crying fetus statues to hatch out of eggs found in bird's nest, and also for a human head to shatter like glass when it is knocked off the body and slammed against the wall. The movie doesn't try to explain any of this, nor does it really try to explain anything about the wolves. They just exist. No one knows where the come from, no one knows how someone becomes a werewolf, but apparently it really doesn't take much to kill them. Normally one would expect a movie about werewolves to have some kind of rules set down, but this movie is pure fantasy. Some of it works because I really don't care that in one transformation scene the man tears his skin off to reveal a wolf, but then in another, a wolf seems to burst right out of a man's mouth. That's lot more than you can say about "Freeway," the white trash riding hood story. And thank god it rises above my student film Little Red Ridinghood which basically just involved chainsaws, cocaine, wolf contact lenses, gooey effects, and the crotch. If it passes that, then it's okay by me.
The whole movie seems to take place inside a sleeping girl's head. While we're seeing all these bits of lunacy, we are intercut with what appears to be the lead actress tossing and turning in her bed, and from the background it looks like it is in the present. There's so much storytelling and flashbacks in this movie, that I can't image ever having a dream like the one in this film. Something tells me that this girl needs a headscan, stat. I guess what I like about the movie is that it feels like it's a kid's movie. It really does, especially with the opening credits that look to be typed on powerpoint, and the presence of Angela Landsbury telling stories to her young granddaughter. The movie isn't a dark "updated fairy tale" like the "Snow White" film starring Sigourney Weaver, and thank god that it's nothing like "Pinocchio's Revenge," but I like what Neil Jordan has done here. He seems to have made an anti-children's film. If a fairy tale is done right, it is morbid. This movie has got some pretty morbid scenes.
Sarah Patterson stars as Rosaleen, a 12 year old girl who spends much of her time with her Grandmother (Angela Landsbury). This dreamlike world that Rosaleen is in appears to take place, I'm guessing, in the 19th century, somewhere where the ground is still a little steamy from the medieval times. The first part of the movie deals with Landsbury telling Rosaleen some stories in front of the fireplace. You're thinking to yourself, okay, 80s era Landsbury, voice of the Disney commercials, Jessica Fletcher, how hokey is this going to get. If you ever want to see Angela Landsbury telling some dark and depraved stories to a 12 year old girl, then this is your film. The stories she tells and are shown to us in graphic detail, and one has to wonder if, when telling the story, Landsbury left in the part where Stephen Rea strips down naked and runs off into the woods, then turns into a wolf without an exoskeleton.
The movie kind of plays upon this town's paranoia about wolves. Men trap wolves and then kill them for no real reason at all, and there's a saying that goes on that you cannot trust a man who has a unibrow, which explains why Burt tore out Ernie's jugular on the Very Sesame Street Christmas. We see a lot of wolf packs (with eyes like the ghost pig in the original "Amityville Horror"), and the movie revolved a lot around Rosaleen trying to make sense of all these stories, determining whether or not they are real or just plain legend. There's also a subplot where she tries to avoid a local boy who has a crush on her. It's no wonder. This kid looks like an inbred 9 year old Sherminator.
Eventually we get to the point in this story where it goes into full Little Red Ridinghood mode. Finally, Rosaleen is given the red cape, and for some reason or another she has to go to her grandmother's house, and along the way she meets who appears to be Barry Lyndon with a unibrow. We all know where this is going. Rosaleen makes it to grandmother's house, and there sits the man with the unibrow while grandmother is nowhere in site, except for her shattered glasses and some hair in the fire place. What I like about this scene is that it isn't really played for scares like you would think. The scene is very quiet, and for some reason it's really touching, and oddly erotic. It's almost like Rosaleen isn't in fear of the wolf but almost in awe of him, like he's the answer to so many questions running through her head, or the gateway to her adulthood. All of that leads to an ending full of such dire confusion that the only people who could possibly get what the meaning is are top notch nuclear physicists and Thomas Dolby.
The movie seems to have a running theme detailing the loss of innocence. Rosaleen begs to hear these wild tales of the werewolves, and by the time she does, they have become her whole life. Each tale has some wild sexual underlining to them, and the final confrontation is so psychosexual that this wolf never appears like he wants to eat her, it appears like he just plain "wants" her. There is a constant fear of sexuality here. A bride and groom's wedding night is cut short when the man grows hair and turns into a wolf. Rosaleen grows tired of the idiotic townsboy, but becomes turned on and enchanted by the man in the woods, with obvious wolflike features. The only peaceful wolf in the movie is a female wolf. I guess men aren't pigs after all. They are big hairy wolves. Even when Rosaleen wakes up, her life is most definitely not the same as it probably was when she fell asleep. But then again, she is already asleep once the movie opens.
There really are no scares in this film, but as I'm watching the thing, I was never really sure if there were supposed to be any scares. In no way is this a horror film. The movie almost comes across like it's supposed to be some twisted dark comedy. There are scenes in here that I'm positive that they cannot expect me to take seriously. Earlier on in the film, a young girl runs through the woods where she is followed by wolves and then is attacked by a teddy bear and some dolls. The scene where Stephen Rea turns into the skinless werewolf is intercut with scenes of crying children with puke in their mouth crying at him. I laugh at that stuff. I cannot take all of that seriously, nor can I make much sense out of a scene where a kid warns the town of an approaching wolf, causing Rosaleen's father and some townsfolk beat the hell out of the kid when it turns out that Rosaleen is still in the woods. If this movie really is the anti-kids movie, which I say it is, then I guess I can't expect the thing to be a taut nail biter.
Neil Jordan is a director who is kind of like wine, he got much better as the years went along, though I'm sure a fine Pinot Noir would never make "High Spirits." The movie has that cooky oddness about it that makes it feel like a Neil Jordan movie, but as far as the visual style goes, it looks like one of those movies that Nickelodeon used to show on that Special Delivery program years ago. Jordon also penned the screenplay which was adapted from a story by Angela Carter. Carter would later writer the script to the equally bizarre movie "The Magic Toyshop."
You can sit and think about this movie for hours and nothing will really make any sense at all. Do werewolves exist outside of this enchanted forrest, and if they don't, why doesn't this town of what looks like 10 people just move? Why are there scenes of random spiders falling from ceilings, and is this whole thing really a dream? What the hell just happened in this movie? There's a scene where half of a wedding party appears to have turned into wolves because they were taunted by a pregnant redhead. It's from a story told by Rosaleen. There's no reason for her to have told it, and it is never mentioned later on in the film I guess one way to look at it is that if you make a movie that supposedly takes place inside somebody's head, you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want with it. I liked the movie okay, I appreciate what it was going for, how it portrayed man as wolf like sexual predators, and how it just kind of made up plot points as it went along, but honestly I would probably never be in the mood to really watch the thing again. Of course, it has fun doing its thing, and if I can recommend "Erotic Nights of the Living Dead," then I can recommend this movie.
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