What a beautiful movie!

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Better Late Then Never

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) is a teenager, living in a country house in England with her family in the present days, and having a nightmare with wolves and werewolves in the Middle Ages. In her dream, her boring sister is dead, she lives with her father (David Warner) and her mother (Tusse Silberg), but she spends lots of time with her lovely grandmother (Angela Lansbury). Granny tells her many stories of werewolf and gives her the following advice: "- Never stray from the path in the woods, never eat a windfall apple, and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet." One day, Rosaleen, while going to visit her grandmother, meets a handsome man and bets who would arrive first at her granny's house. Soon she finds who he is. "In the Company of Wolves" is the second and one of the most fascinating films by Neil Jordan. Based on the fairy tale of the Little Red Riding Hood, it is indeed an adult stylized version of the tale in a dreamlike atmosphere with open end. But further than that, it is also a spectacular approach of the beginning of the puberty, losing of the innocence through wild and erotic dreams, when the character of Sarah Patterson is becoming a young woman. Neil Jordan makes an excellent horror movie, which can have the most different interpretations, depending on the experience of the viewer. He uses many symbols, such as the lipstick, or the first date of Rosaleen. The gorgeous and promising actress Sarah Patterson has never become a star. With her interpretation in this cult-movie, any fan would believe she would have a great career ahead, what has never come true. My vote is nine. Title (Brazil): "A Companhia dos Lobos" ("The Company of the Wolves")

This movie is the most bizarre thing ever. Despite having a budget of 2 million (where did that go) it looks like it was filmed on a hand-held camera built by a 10 year old for his science fair project that is powered by potatoes. The acting is awful too, not believable and with these weird scenes with bad voiceovers that are just painfully bad. The ending is laughably bad- not scary, not shocking, not some sort of plot twist, just one of those scenes where you are left asking 'Why?' And let me tell you, there are a lot of scenes like that in this movie. The main actresses brooding/ naive combination is jarring and fake, and her acting while she's sleeping and having a nightmare is basically just a bad movie trope come to life. There is no chemistry between any of the characters and the relationships seem forced and unreal. The only ray of hope in the movie is Angela Lansbury, but even she is drowned in a sea of bad lines. There's a scene with a young bride and her husband, and the bride has this freaky wide eyed, boggle-y thing going on that just makes her (bad) acting automatically worse. It seems the actors don't know how to express emotions, so they just widen their eyes in an attempt to seem eerie and abject, when really it just makes them look like idiots trying to be creepy. Watch this movie only if you want a laugh, coz it is not scary, nor is it well made.

This appropriately moody looking film from co-writer / director Neil Jordan is good entertainment, a combination of horror and fairy tale that plays up the sexual angle in its exploration of the werewolf myth. It's true enough that the film is murky, but that fits the material; Jordan avoids a lot of bright colours and his crew give this an excellent period feel. (This only helps to make the red shawl worn by our heroine to really stand out.) The acting is solid, and overall "The Company of Wolves" benefits from its theme of there being more to "wolves" than meets the eye. Of course, this also ties into the time honoured idea of the beast inside man.The film encompasses several tales, all of them either told by kindly Granny (Angela Lansbury) or her granddaughter Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), and supposedly all of them are contained within Rosaleens' dreams. They range from a groom (Stephen Rea) having a surprise in store for his new bride (Kathryn Pogson) to a young man receiving some sort of magical potion from a stranger (Terence Stamp, in an uncredited cameo) to a village that traps a wolf whose paw transforms into a human hand.Enhanced by Bryan Loftus's lighting and the music of George Fenton, "The Company of Wolves" is deliberately paced but full of atmosphere; one does feel like they are being transported to another time and place. It's also full of creepy imagery, and Christopher Tucker contributes makeup and transformation effects that may not quite measure up to what Rick Baker and Rob Bottin devised for their respective werewolf classics ("An American Werewolf in London", "The Howling"), but are striking nevertheless. The dialogue created by Angela Carter has a very literate quality. The cast - ever delightful Lansbury, Rea, David Warner, Graham Crowden, Brian Glover, Danielle Dax, Jim Carter - does creditable work, with young Patterson convincingly essaying an essential innocence.This film remains somewhat forgotten today, having come in the wake of those aforementioned werewolf pictures, so for lovers of the sub genre, it should be worth their while to discover it.Seven out of 10.

Neil Jordan could never be considered your typical horror filmmaker. He's most well known for his thrillers, frequently set among the beautifully photographed Irish countryside. The director has, on occasion, dabbled in the genre: The supernatural farce "High Spirits," the romantic "Interview with a Vampire," the Freudian psycho-horror of "The Butcher Boy," the botched mainstream thriller "In Dreams," most recently the immensely satisfying undead character study "Byzantium." Near the beginning of his career, however, he created one of the oddest werewolf movies ever made, as far as you could get from a typical horror film, the gorgeous, allegorical "The Company of Wolves." Adapted from Angela Carter's book of feminist fairy tale reimagings, the film's stories are told through several framing devices. In the modern day, a young girl has locked herself away from her family in her room, suffering from cramps presumably brought on by her first menstruation. She dreams of living in a vaguely medieval village. In the dream, her wise grandmother tells her stories of men becoming wolves. One tale involves a disappeared husband returning to his wife in a most unexpected way, another about a boy meeting the devil. Soon, Rosaleen herself has become the story teller, telling tales of wolves at a wedding and a she-wolf, before the stories seem to invade both her dreaming life and her waking life."The Company of Wolves" is fraught with allegory. The film mostly concerns itself with a young girl coming into adulthood, with men and their sexual appetites represented as wolves. In the dream, Rosaleen's older sister has been killed by a wolf. The developing young girl is soon being courted by the neighbor's boy, who urges her to step off the path and kiss him. She doesn't seem much interested and rebukes his advances. At night, she awakens to see her parents making love, an act which seems to confuse and intrigue her. The movie directly confronts the Little Red Riding Hood story in its last act. While on the way to Grandmother's house, Rosaleen meets a charming huntsman. The two flirt openly, the girl obviously attracted to the predatory man. Carter combines the original fable's sexually voracious Big Bad Wolf with the heroic, positively masculine huntsman, not distinguishing between "good" or "bad" sexuality. Once at the house, upon realizing he's a wolf, Rosaleen cast her red hood into the fire, an act heavy with symbolic importance. The ending turns the tables, the young girl taking control over the wolf. Considering the entire movie has associated wolves with wanton sexuality, the ending blatantly implies a girl becoming a woman, embracing sex on her own terms.Though "The Company of Wolves" is never a typical horror picture, Neil Jordan and his team create some striking, horrifying images. An early moment has Rosaleen stepping through a giant version of her bedroom, her childhood toys transformed into menacing figures. The first werewolf transformation, a man tearing his flesh off to reveal the wolf underneath, is startling and graphic. A wedding party morphing into a pack of wolves is similarly unsettling, the twisted faces reflected in a broken mirror. The best moment comes near the end, the huntsman falling to the ground, contorting, his skin bulging, a wolf bursting from his human flesh. It's hard to say if gore hounds will have the patience for a movie as surreal as "The Company of Wolves" but I suspect they'd truly appreciate moments like these.Of course, Jordan's images entrance as much as they disgust. The movie's loose, dream-like tone allows the director to create surreal, unforgettable moments. The girl in the red hood scales a tree in the forest, finding a bird's nest full of eggs. She smears on lipstick before the eggs hatch, revealing weeping statues of infants. The implications of sexual awakening and motherhood are fine but the strangeness of the image is far more likely to stick with the viewer. Most memorably, a major character is decapitated, their head flying away and shattering like a porcelain doll. The final tale-within-the-tale is about a female wolf climbing out of a well, an intoxicatingly gorgeous segment that is rich with mythic meaning. Smaller moments shine, like a book full of spiders or a white rose blooming into a red one, each full of symbolic importance.The cast is filled out with experienced character actors like Angela Lansbury, who is excellent, and David Warner, as well as Jordan regular Stephen Rea. However, Sarah Patterson truly fascinates in the lead role. Her Rosalen is a lovely young girl and Patterson is all too willing to play the part's complexity. The film's interior world is too complicated for Rosaleen to be a simple heroine. Instead, Patterson plays the part with the richness the material demands. The actress has few credits after this which is truly a shame. I would have loved to seen more of her.From George Fenton's lush score, to Anton Furst's intricate production design, to Bryan Loftus' gorgeous cinematography, "The Company of Wolves" is a fascinating and dark reinvention of classic fairy tales. You could read into the movie's rich subtext or simply let the images wash over you. Either way, you're unlikely to forget it.