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Blood and Chocolate

You'll howl

By TOM MEEK | January 31, 2007

1.0 Stars

BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE: A preposterous sleight of hand

Shape shifters or werewolves have always required crafty cinematic sleight of hand. The Wolf Man and An American Werewolf in London were wonders in their times, but in a CGI-FX-fueled universe — with Underworld as the standard — this giddy confection is an adolescent girl parading around in her mother’s make-up. To become the beast is something of an Olympic event, where a lycanthrope will leap through the air, effortlessly twisting and contorting like a high diver, till she achieves an æthereal glow, and when she touches down, she’s a wolf. Silly, yes, but so is much of Katja von Garnier’s film (based on Annette Curtis Klause’s book), in which a nubile young lycan (Agnes Bruckner) falls for an American expatriate (Hugh Dancy) in Bucharest. Bruckner’s Vivian conveys the pull of allegiance between love and “the pack” with a dour scowl. Then there’s von Garnier’s overdose of blurry B-quality slo-mo. The result is preposterous and so inadvertently cheesy, it’ll make you howl.

Related: Fractured fairy tales, Anti-depressant cinema, New to DVD on January 17, 2006, More

Topics: Reviews , Hugh Dancy, Agnes Bruckner, Katja von Garnier

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