Blood and Chocolate

Blood and Chocolate (2007)

Directed by: Katja von Garnier
Written by: Ehren Kruger & Christopher Landon, based on the novel by Annette Curtis Klause
Starring: Agnes Bruckner, Hugh Dancy, Oliver Martinez, Katja Riemann, Bryan Dick

Being the second part of my Superbowl double feature. I've read some really bad reviews of this movie, but I figured, hey, what the fuck, so I went to see it anyway.

It's about a young werewolf who is promised to the leader of her pack but falls in love with a human and all kinds of complications arise.

I would say that the story wasn't very well paced. Most of it is agonizingly slow, and they repeat a lot of stuff. It seemed kind of like the creators weren't really working together the whole time, and everybody had a different idea as to what the movie was about. It seemed to be a Romeo & Juliet story mixed with political whatnot, and a story about a graphic novelist, and a study of werewolf culture, and a horror movie, and an action movie. So it was all very confused.

Also, the characters weren't very well developed, being two dimensional stereotypes, and most of the actors were painful to watch particularly Oliver Martinez and Agnes Bruckner. She was just dull.

Now, I liked the fact that they went Back to Bucharest, so to speak, setting the whole thing in Romania (well, almost the whole thing. There's about two and a half minutes worth of flashback set in the Rockies or something, but whatever). It appeared to be shot in Romania, which is cool, though there weren't really that many Romanian people in it. I guess Oliver Martinez was supposed to be from there? I have no idea.

And there were some pretty nifty scenes. Wolves chasing a drug dealer through the woods. Beautiful. And GODDAMMIT, they were actually wolves! Not fucking CGI monstrosities that look more like apes than anything. The transformation effects were kind of cool, too.

I liked the mythology of the werewolf, too. Or the loup-garou. (Sure, that's how that's spelled...) Whatever you want to call them. That was the best thing about the Underworld movies (which were, produced by the same people what produced this one). They called them lycans in that one... interesting. Werewolf is a silly word anyway. Not half as sexy as vampire. Vampire. It's got a V in it and everything.

I liked Bryan Dick, too. I thought he was good and creepy. A creepy pretty boy with nifty eyeballs. His character was a shitty little worm, though, and hey, he was just like that guy in Underworld... you know the one. That dweezle what works for Bill Nighy... or Michael Sheen... or whatever... this Bryan guy was better though. And English! He gets extra points for that.

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