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Brotherhood of the Wolf

Starring: Samuel le Bihan, Vincent Cassel
Director: Christophe Gans
Genre: Horror
Year: 2002
Rating: 3 / 5

Reviewed by Guest Scribe Legend

As movies go, Brotherhood of the Wolf is pretty unique. You have to watch it with a certain mindset, however, or fussiness will ruin the viewing pleasure. If you are not willing to accept a quasi-historical, horror, martial arts, mystery, bodice-ripper of a movie, then you may as well eschew this one.

One plus is that the movie is pretty scary. Set on the eve of the French Revolution, most of the movie is about Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) and Mani (Mark Dacascos) attempting to track down the Beast of Gevaudan, an unknown monster terrorizing a remote region of mountainous France. The Beast has killed a slew of peasants, women and children, and what makes it scary for quite a while is that we don't see what it actually looks like for the first hour of the movie.

Grégoire and Mani make an odd combination. The former is a taxidermist and natural philosopher, the latter an Iroquois martial arts expert. Both have recently returned from New France (French Canada) and are intent on getting to the bottom of things. Grégoire, the intellectual, believes there must a perfectly scientific explanation for things. It takes them a while to come face to face with the Beast, however.

At this point of the movie, I was highly dissatisfied. Though scary, it was nothing but a jacked-up horror flick which happened to have pretty costumes and nice scenery. Plus, the martial arts seemed out of place and gratuitous, with cheesy slow motion camera work. When the plot starts to unfold, however, things become exponentially more interesting.

Of course, there had to be a reason for the introduction of so many characters who seem to dance around the plot tangentially and pointlessly for a fair amount of time. These include Grégoire's love interest, Marianne (Emilie Dequenne), her countess mother (Edith Scob) and her one-armed brother (Vincent Cassel), all members of the local nobility. And also the priest, Sardis (Jean-François Stévenin), Thomas D'Apcher (Jérémie Rénier), the narrator of the film who tells the story for posterity in recollection on his way to the guillotine, and Grégoire's bordello lover, Sylvia (Monica Bellucci), whose use of the bladed fan is reminiscent of Princess Kitana.

When things come together, this supporting cast shines. It soon becomes evident who among them is hero and who is villain. Once it becomes evident that someone controls the Beast (in a very Sleepy Hollow-like fashion), what was simply a gruesome horror movie adopts the mystery element that it lacked when Grégoire and Mani were just looking aimlessly for a large wolf. And the membership of the Brotherhood of the Wolf turns out to be intriguing indeed.

A few warnings for the faint of heart. This movie has some extremely gory moments. Some that comes to mind are a naked corpse with entrails leaking out being eaten by crows, and some bloody taxidermy involving the dissection of a wolf. In my opinion, those were more difficult to view than the actual killing done by the Beast.

I would rank this movie in the 'pretty good' range mostly because it turned out to be a lot cooler than I thought it was going to be while watching the beginning part of the film. And for the record, this was the first time I've ever had a stranger excited enough to come up to me and talk about a film afterwards. He thought it was "pretty damn good" and several other like-minded moviegoers drifted over to join in the discussion, giving me the opportunity to skitter away. Point being, Brotherhood will definitely get a following for people who are into these sorts of things.

Cast:

Certification: Rated R for violence and nudity.
Running Time: 142 minutes.

Additional Info: Internet Movie Database
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