La compagnie des loups

Thirteen-year-old teenager Rosaleen : Sarah Petterson lives with her parents : David Warner , Tusse Silberg, on the outskirts of a forbidding forest . Meanwhile , the beautiful girl listens her grandmother : Angela Lansbury telling fairy tales and the latter fills the heroine's head with grim stories of wolves until a sticky final . As Rosaleen dreams of a medieval fantasy environment inhabited by men who turn into wolves. As the bizarre world in which the charming teen lives is full of polecats, owls , toads , snakes , hopping , prowling and slithering round the crooked houses of the woods .

A horror fairy tale , being consistently paced , freely based on Charles's Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood and crossing it with Legend of the Werewolf . Weird terror movie that's heavy on dreamy visuals , gorgeous production design by Anthon Furst , colorful cinematography by Bryan Loftus , primitive but acceptable special effects with gruesomely vivid werewolves and Freudian symbolism . Main cast and support cast are frankly excellent , giving powerful interpretations . Starring attractive Sarah Patterson as the girl who's on the verge of womanhood and discovers rare worlds , in spite of her early age she gives an enticing acting , as well as high quality performance from veteran Angela Lansbury as the sympathetic granny , along with brief interpretations from David Warner, Georgia Slowe, Graham Cowden , Brian Glover , Terence Stamp and Stephen Rea who is Jordan's regular .

It displays a sensitive and atmospheric musical score by George Fenton, adding a medieval backgrounding sounds . The motion picture was original and compellingly written -along with Angela Carter- and directed by Neil Jordan . This great filmmaker has made splendid movies, such as : Mona Lisa , High Spirits , We're no Angels , The Crying Game , The Miracle , Interview with the Vampire, in Dreams, Michael Collins , The Butcher Boy , The Good Thief , The Brave One , Byzantium , among others . Rating : Better than average . Worthwhile watching . Essential and indispensable seeing.

The company of wolves is very far from being the typical movie about werewolves, it's very different from films such as An American Werewolf in London or The Howling. This film is full of symbolism, it's a kind of rewriting of Perrault's Little Red Ridding Hood with Freudian elements. The film was directed by Neil Jordan, but in it we can notice the writing of Angela Carter, an author who is mainly interested in rewriting folklore myths from a feminist point of view. If you see this film you will enter a world of magic, of dreams, not only by means of the script, but also by the settings, which are really wonderful. The film itself deals with the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence, with all its sexual connotations, and the loss of innocence. When we become adults we realize life is not a magic tale. All this is treated from a feminist point of view, the main character is a girl who dreams about several stories with werewolves. Visually the movie is incredible, and it manages to reflect the symbolism of woods, the mixture of light and darkness, the magic creatures which live there during the night and the dangerous inside them especially for the girls who don't follow the path. From my point of view the film is one of the best dealing with the myth of werewolves, mainly because the film is a metaphor of life, of the human specie, all of us have an animal inside.

I cannot recommend this movie highly enough.

The Company of Wolves is Little Red Riding Hood, expanded into it's essential truth, and told on the screen as stories within a dream. Everything is here; the girl, the wolf, the mysterious and terrible Wald that vomits up the kind of black myths which only inhabit the inner world of young girls and midieval Germans.

Angela Lansbury is Granny, the role she was born to play; "Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple, and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet."

I'd didn't realize how numb I had become to CGI until I watched this movie with it's meaty animatronics. Also featured is a very large and diverse cast of real animals, most of whom make brief cameos as portents in obscure corners of the frame. Man, there's nothing for communicating animalness like real animals. It must have been a pain to choreograph the animals in the movie, but so worth it.

If you've noticed that the more rich people get, the less able they are to distinguish human beings from animals (Picture: a dog, dressed in a sweater, seated at a high chair in a restaurant, eating off the table out of a crystal bowl. This actually happens in the tonier and more depraved neighborhoods in America) then you will love the 19th century wedding scene.

A true fairy tale doesn't have a moral, but it does have rules. "Mummy, does daddy hurt you when he... it sounds like... the beast Granny talked about." "Your Granny ... knows a lot, but she doesn't know everything. And if there's a beast in men, it meets it's match in women too."

Hahaha fair enough.

Let's all thank god for Neil Jordan. Not only did he bring Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire to the screen in an uncompromising, superb adaptation, but way back at the start of his career he also brought us this mini-masterpiece about werewolves.

The setup is simple. A teenage girl in a country manor falls asleep while reading a magazine (with a cover story entitled "the shattered dream" -- a subtle hint to some of the themes of this movie), and she has a disturbing dream involving wolves which appears to take place in the woods visible from her bedroom window. It begins with a girl being chased down by a pack of wolves and killed, then we move to her funeral and discover she had a sister. The sister is your typical inquisitive girl just blossoming into womanhood, and her wise old grandmother tells her stories about men changing into wolves, with the message that all men are beasts. These stories make the girl uncomfortable about the advances of a local boy, and later a charming nobleman, and her perceptions of her parent's love life don't help. As the town becomes more and more terrified by the danger of wolf attacks, they begin to unearth evidence that there are in fact werewolves out in the woods. These findings and her own active imagination lead the girl to come up with her own werewolf stories. And when she is sent out through the woods with a red cloak and basket to visit her grandmother, you just know that there's going to be trouble ...

The Company of Wolves is a well-made, smart and highly original piece of work, and it is this movie that got Irish director Neil Jordan noticed internationally. The surreal, dream-like atmosphere of the movie is both superb and engaging, and the metaphorical nature of the movie is reasonably subtle. It is about a young girl's coming-of-age, trying to decide whether or not all men are in fact beasts when she still isn't quite sure exactly what they want from her.

Generally, werewolf movies made by European film-makers tend to have more substance and more familiarity with actual werewolf folklore -- it is part of our history after all, while Hollywood has had to create it's own werewolf myth over the years. This is probably the best British werewolf movie, followed by Dog Soldiers and Curse of the Werewolf, but even American classics like The Wolf Man and of course An American Werewolf in London, had to be set in Britain.

The lead role is played by Sarah Patterson, a young girl in her debut role at just 12 years old. After this she only appeared in one more movie (Snow White, also in the Canon Movie Tales series) then for some reason gave up on movie acting. She would certainly have had a successful career after this, you would think. The supporting actors also do good jobs, particularly Micha Bergese as the huntsman and Angela Lansbury as the creative grandmother. Other well-known names appear here in smaller roles, including Brian Glover (the yorkshireman from American Werewolf), David Warner, Stephen Rea and Terence Stamp.

It currently ranks as one of my all-time favourite werewolf movies, and I expect it to grow on me even more over time. I can recommend this without any reservation.

This is one of those films that you either love or hate.

Depending on your personal taste, you will be either captivated by it or thoroughly bored. I happen to fit into the first category.

I must admit to having seen its video box for years and was completely turned off by it. I had been thinking, "Oh yuck, another 'gross out' werewolf movie."

So after discovering by accident what this movie was truly about (in the margin of a child's fairy tale book in my local Barnes and Noble!!!), I thought "I've got to see this."

And it wasn't easy to find.

But once I did, I was genuinely enthralled by the gorgeous and lovingly detailed backgrounds, the remarkable script and imagery. Think of this as "Little Red Riding Hood" goes "Eraserhead".

A thoroughly weird but wonderful little film that belongs in a secret classification all its own (along with such brilliant projects as "Head", "Eraserhead", "The Blair Witch Project" and the original "Haunting", to name a few) in which surrealistic suggestions, your brain and the power of your imagination rule the night.

In short, if you're looking for a run-of-the-mill 80s slasher flick then this movie is definitely NOT for you. If, on the other hand, you want to see a wonderful dark take on a traditional fairy tale then you will have a hard time making a better choice than this one!

One small note I wish to add: if you know about and/or raise real wolves like I do, you might find the scenes with them chasing others through the forest and bursting through the walls more funny than frightening. I say this because you know perfectly well how shy and gentle real wolves are, how completely opposite they are from European tradition as flesh and blood devils. But even so, you will enjoy watching those scenes anyway simply because its still fun to watch the cinematography of those gorgeous, fluffy little wolves running about all over the place with those huge smiles on their faces (they're obviously in a great mood and don't look the least bit vicious--I don't think I ever saw one of them actually snarl anywhere, just howl and smile).

Oh, and the "He Wolf" who ends up beating our red-hooded heroine home gives a genuinely stunning (but brief) performance. He's both disturbing and amusing to watch. He snarls. He writhes. He tempts and glares in the most sinister of ways, and he even sticks his tounge out to lick himself all over his own face doggy-style in ways that even Gene Simmons would envy----here's hoping the actor went on to receive acclaim in his career!