Made at a time when the British were coming (alledgedly), the intervening years have not been kind to
Company Of Wolves. It still looks gorgeous, and has a worryingly attractive young female lead in Sarah Patterson, but the idea of taking old fairy tales and goreing them up seems... well... a bit passe, really.
The story (such that it is - the film is really an excuse for a series of setpieces loosely based on the short stories of Angela Carter) concerns a girl who has shut herself in her bedroom, put on her sister's make-up and fallen asleep. She then dreams that her annoying sister has been killed by wolves in a Grimm Fairy Tales forest setting, and the rest of the film shows the results of the not-real tragedy.
All very odd, made odder by of having the girl wake up and fall asleep again, making things change and jarring the plot into dream-like incoherence.
"So if you should spy on a naked man in the wood, run as if the Devil himself were after you!
Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet!"
At points she's listening to granny (Angela Lansbury) telling fairy stories and warning of men who are "hairy on the inside" and whose eyebrows meet in the middle, then she's telling tales of her own to her mourning mother. Meanwhile dad (the always-confused David "From Beyond The Grave" Warner) is busy hoping to hunt down the guilty wolf.
Unfortunately, for a film which glories in its werewolf transformations, the effects aren't really up to much. They're not a patch on American Werewolf In London (which predates it by a good three years) and they look distinctly plasticky.
One man rips his face off to bring the wolf out, another has the wolf in him burst out through his mouth. And in the most famous sequence, a bunch of Regency revellers have their party cut short when a pregnant redhead turns them all into confused-looking Alsations (hairy knockers ahoy!).
We're also denied the pleasure of seeing Angela Lansbury getting torn to shreds by a wolf - when it's her turn to bite the dust, she turns into a porcelain doll, T'pau video-style. Well, it was the mid 80s, I suppose.
The sexual imagery is also layed on with a trowel - Rosaleen (Patterson) experiments with make-up (much like Anna in the similar but better Paperhouse) as she turns into a woman, and of course she paints her lips big and red. The giant mushrooms peppered about the set are ridiculously phallic, and despite granny's warnings not to "stray from the path", she does so - with devastating results. That'll teach her.
Everyone concerned with making Company Of Wolves seemed to think they were making high art, but to modern audiences it's just not that clever.
Download links:
http://rapidshare.com/files/26070858/sevlow.part01.rarhttp://rapidshare.com/files/26068508/sevlow.part02.rarhttp://rapidshare.com/files/26066090/sevlow.part03.rarhttp://rapidshare.com/files/26063698/sevlow.part04.rarhttp://rapidshare.com/files/26061060/sevlow.part05.rarhttp://rapidshare.com/files/26058201/sevlow.part06.rarhttp://rapidshare.com/files/26055051/sevlow.part07.rarhttp://rapidshare.com/files/26052069/sevlow.part08.rarhttp://rapidshare.com/files/26048680/sevlow.part09.rarPass: foxnet
or
torrent
A bag full of symbolic folklore about werewolves, or, rather, their sexual connotation. 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; about sudden disappearances of spouses when the moon is round & the wolves are howling in the woods; about babies found inside stork eggs, in a stork nest high up a tree; etc., etc. Of course the story of Little Red Ridinghood is also present, with a very handsome he-wolf! (And of course this he-wolf consumes Grandmother, but 'consumes' Little Red Ridinghood). All the stories are somehow reducible to loss of innocence, and fear of/hunger for (a newly acquired sense of) sexuality; their Freudian character is mirrored in their dreamlike shapes. This movie is not really a horror movie; it's more a multiple tale about growing up into adolescence.
La Bête is the most notorious work from controversial Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk, who came to fame as an animator in the 1960s, but who ended up directing tacky softcore porn films in the 1980s (including the utterly diabolical Emmanuelle 5). Before his sorry decline into mediocrity, Borowczyk established himself as the master of a new brand of surreal eroticism, where pornography meets fine art to create a unique and utterly bizarre cinematic experience.
La Bête is perhaps the prime example of this. It combines anti-bourgeois black comedy (very reminiscent of the work of French film director Luis Buñuel) with camp gothic horror and softcore porn. The result ought to be a pretentious, unwatchable mess, but it isn’t. Although it is far from being a great work of cinema, La Bête has an indefinable quality of artistic flair about it, constantly surprising its audience with its originality and daring. It is also probably the most explicit depiction of female sexuality in cinema, something which will either delight or shock anyone watching the film.
The film’s pièce de résistance is a flashback sequence which offers a pornographic re-working of the Beauty and the Beast tale. Here, a man in an unconvincing bear costume chases a beautiful young maiden through a sunny glade before confronting her with a comic phallus of truly monstrous proportions. With its overly explicit depiction of male and female orgasm, perhaps in the worst possible taste, this sequence ends up appearing far more like a cheap comical sketch than a serious piece of erotica. Like most of this film, it really only works if it is seen from a comic perspective. This is not a film about the horror of bestiality – it is much more about the grotesque absurdity of human sexuality.
Not surprisingly, the film suffered at the hand of the censors for its graphic depiction of sex when it was distributed outside of France. In the UK the film was subjected to substantial cuts, and was soon banned. The film was only released uncut 25 years after its initial release in France. Even today, the film is still able to surprise its audience with its daring and sometimes disturbing portrayal of female sexuality.
