BEFORE: Also in the interest of completeness - I'll revisit this film, which I tried to watch years ago, but lost interest in - or found it hard to understand. Maybe I was having a bad day, so I feel I should give it another shot.
THE PLOT: Granny tells her granddaughter Rosaleen strange, disturbing tales about innocent maidens falling in love with handsome, heavily eyebrowed strangers with a smoldering look in their eyes.
AFTER: The main framing story here is like a kinky version of "Little Red Riding Hood", with the characters of the Big Bad Wolf and the Huntsman merged into the same character, and Li'l Red as an older teen named Rosaleen - coming to terms with her sexuality (as symbolized by the blood-red shawl) Having the older man attack Granny, then wait for the teenage girl to show up - it just points out how sexual the fairy tale has always been, which most people fail to realize. The male wolf wants to get into Red's "basket of goodies"... Gee, what big eyes you have...and big teeth...and, well, you can guess what comes next. Why didn't we realize as kids all the dirty implications of this story? It's like one step away from bestiality porn!
Before the kinky stuff, though, Granny tells Rosaleen a number of wolf-based stories (more tales-within-tales...) A woman's husband disappears, but returns years later to find that she's taken a new husband, and in his anger, transforms into a wolf. A serving maid gets revenge on the nobleman that impregnated her by turning his entire wedding party into wolves. It's like the same punchline, told over and over, to end different jokes.
The wolfen transformations are extremely fakey - some very obvious uses of puppetry. But they're also very graphic - in one case a man rips off all of the skin on his head, before the snout elongates and the fur grows to cover the muscles. Yuck.
And you know that a film is overly "arty" when someone's head gets lopped off, and it shatters on the floor like a porcelain doll's head. This is roughly equivalent to all those cheezy 80's music videos where they dipped roses in liquid nitrogen so they'd shatter on the floor in spectacular slow-motion fashion. It's a bad sign.
This is meant to be a non-linear storyline, and everything depicted may in fact be part of a teen girl's dream. So it's tough to say what actually "happened" and what is just symbolic. It seems like in the end Rosaleen defeated the Huntsman/Big Bad Wolf, then decided to become a werewolf herself, in order to become his mate. But that's just one possible interpretation, I suppose.
Starring Angela Lansbury (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Stephen Rea (last seen in "V For Vendetta"), and another one of my fave actors, David Warner (last seen in "The Concorde: Airport '79", but he's another guy who's been in so much great stuff, from "Time Bandits" to "Star Trek V" AND VI, "Time After Time", "Twin Peaks", "Tron", etc.)
Oh, and an uncredited appearance by Terence Stamp (last seen in "Yes Man") as the devil (?)
RATING: 3 out of 10 unibrows. I do prefer it when stories make a little more sense.
SPOOK-O-METER: 4 out of 10. More psycho-sexual than scary. Upsetting in the way that foreign films are oblique.
No comments:
Post a Comment