FILM REVIEW OF "BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE'' (2007)

Talk about a lackluster horror yarn! This pretentious supernatural saga got to the box office a year ahead of "Twilight," but it shares many narrative similarities. The girl in “Blood and Chocolate” (** OUT OF ****), is a werewolf rather than a vampire, but the guy is an ordinary human being. “Iron Jawed Angels” director Katja von Garnier states on the “Blood and Chocolate” DVD commentary track that she envisaged this tale of forbidden love as "‘Romeo and Juliet’ with wolves.” Moreover, she points out that she didn’t want to make a traditional horror movie. Instead, she refers to it as ‘an anti-horror movie.’ Although she dwells primarily on the romance, von Garnier and scenarists Ehren Kruger of "Reindeer Games" and Christopher B. Landon of "Another Day In Paradise" graph on just enough suspense and tension so that "Blood and Chocolate" qualifies as a quasi-horror film. The filmmakers divide their energies between two plots: first, a centuries old feud between man and wolf that has yielded an uneasy truce, and second, the reluctance of a 19-year old girl to adhere to the rules of wolf society. When the leader of the pack isn’t trying to recruit the heroine as his next mate, he has to worry about his rebellious son who has violated the rule that werewolves never hunt outside their pack. Clearly, this movie is all about breaking traditions, whether those traditions are cinematic or social. "Blood and Chocolate" amounts to a postmodern werewolf saga because the werewolves, referred to here as the ‘loup-garoux,’ resemble neither the standard Lon Chaney, Jr., Hollywood werewolf nor those of the "Underworld" franchise. The “Blood and Chocolate” werewolves are born werewolves, and the full moon doesn't dictate when they change their shape. Moreover, they are not man/wolf hybrids, and they cannot curse humans and turn them into werewolves when they take a chomp out of them.

The female protagonist, Vivian Gandillion (Angnes Bruckner of "Vacancy 2: The First Cut"), earns her living working in a bakery where she makes chocolate when she isn’t jogging aimlessly around the countryside. She discovers that she has been designated by destiny to be the next bride for the big bad wolf-pack leader Gabriel (Olivier Martinez of "Unfaithful"), in a ritual that is occurs every seven years. Currently, Gabriel is sharing his affections with Astrid (Katja Riemann of "My Führer"), and they are the parents of Rafe who is now fully grown up. Sometimes, the logic in the film seems flawed. Clearly, Rafe (Bryan Dick of "Master and Commander"), is a teenager on the verge of becoming a twenty something adult. After all, he frequents a bar with five of his wolf-pack friends. Anyway, Rafe is upset because Gabriel is about to leave his mother for a new woman. The filmmakers never clear up this narrative problem. Indeed, it looks like there is a shortage of female wolves. Further, it appears that Gabriel still hangs around Astrid, even though their seven year hitch must have elapsed at least seven years ago! We learn from one of Gabriel’s speeches to the wolf pack before they hunt a scumbag drug dealer, that the wolves once ruled the land. Five-thousand years later, time has not be kind to the wolves so they must share the land with humans who are willing to kill them.

The first scene establishes the feud between man and wolves as hunters with high-powered rifles kill Vivian's parents and sister in the woods of Colorado. They appear out of nowhere while Vivian and her sister are making snow angels in the snow and shoot them without warning. Miraculously, Vivian manages to escape and has gone to live in Bucharest, Romania, with her aunt Astrid. Man and wolf have maintained an uneasy truce in Bucharest, but Rafe threatens this peace when he kills a twenty-something gal that he encounters in a nightclub. Here again, the filmmakers aren’t particularly clear about Rafe’s motivations. Did he kill the young woman out of hatred? Or did he kill her because he couldn’t control himself? We are never told. Meantime, Vivian doesn't want to mate with Gabriel after Aiden Galvin (Hugh Dancy of "King Arthur") enters her life. She runs into Aiden in an old church that is a sanctuary for werewolves. She meets Aiden while he is conducting research for his latest graphic novel about wolves. Bucharest, it seems, is a very werewolf friendly city. Occasionally, the police work with Gabriel and his minions. Aiden impresses Vivian with his considerable knowledge about the legendary loup-garoux. Jokingly, he refers to her as the ‘wolf-girl,’ a nickname that she deplores. During a stroll through the city, he furnishes the necessary exposition that audiences need to know about these different kind of wolves.

While the filmmakers aren’t rewriting werewolf rules, they rewrite the 1997 erotic young adult novel by Annette Curtis Klause. The fans of the novel have been vocal in their strident objections to these revisions. Von Garnier and her scribes have transferred the setting from West Virginia to Romania. Mind you, the novel takes place entirely in the United States. Presumably, an American setting lacked the old world allure of a European setting. Surprisingly, the producers of the "Underworld" franchise had their paws in this bland creature feature, but "Blood and Chocolate" generates little of the excitement of the "Underworld" movies. The best scene is a showdown in a church between Aiden and Rafe who drools at the chance to kill Aiden. Rafe refers to Aiden at one point as the 'meat-boy.' Initially, jealous wolf-pack leader Gabriel only wanted Rafe to run Aiden out of town because he was interfering with his plans to mate with Vivian.

"Blood and Chocolate" exudes a lot of atmosphere, but little in the way of either suspense or chills. The scenes where the humans morph into wolves look ethereal but raise the age-old question about clothing. Do their apparel just magically vanish or is it absorbed? Unfortunately, von Garnier demonstrates minimal flair with the material. Not only is “Blood and Chocolate” a tame horror chiller, but it is also a lame love story. Production designer Kevin Phipps deserves praise for his authentic-looking sets. Indeed, all of the scenes with the real-life wolves were lensed on interior sets that look as if they were exterior sets. Brendan Galvin’s wide-screen cinematography is great to look at and Bucharest is a fabulous city. If you want to see "Blood and Chocolate" as it should have been done, then watch the much better as well as wittier “Ginger Snaps.”

FILM REVIEW OF ''FRIDAY THE 13TH" (2009)

Jason is back with a murderous vengeance in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake director Marcus Nispel’s “Friday the 13th” (** out of ****), and he doesn’t aim to please. This invincible villain with his attitude toward pre-marital sex has changed. Essentially, the new “Friday the 13th” synthesizes Sean S. Cunningham’s above-average original along with Steve Minor’s first and second gratuitous sequels to deliver the maximum amount of mayhem. Nevertheless, despite its slick, ultra-polished production values, nudity, and carnage, this “Friday” lacks a shred of creativity. Clearly, nobody expected anything fresh from the new “Friday the 13th,” but Nispel’s remake shows more interest in Jason than Jason’s truly demented mother. Gorehounds weaned on the “Saw” sagas will gripe about the lack of brutality. Everybody else will feel like they’ve suffered through a nightmare in a hospital emergency room. Prudes will carp about the soft-core porno scenes and the voyeurism that panders to its lusty teenage audience. Bluntly, “Friday the 13th” generates no suspense, but does a number on your eardrums.

The original “Friday the 13th” dealt with a mom gone amok over the drowning death of her son while teenage counselors who were supposed to be watching him indulged in sex. Mrs. Voorhees vented her rage and cut a swathe with a machete through those amorously distracted teenagers. Indeed, Jason appeared only at the last moment in Cunningham’s 1980 original and he was only a boy. Incidentally, the first “Friday the 13th” helped launch the slasher genre a couple of years of John Carpenter’s mildly bloody “Halloween.” Mind you, Jason didn’t don the hockey mask that provided him with more personality than any other slasher stalker until the second sequel, “Friday the 13th in 3-D (1982) and by that time his immortality was taken for granted. After all, Jason is basically supernatural. He has more lives than a cat. He’s been frozen, blasted into outer space, and consigned to Hell with few ill effects. A mute, inexorable, slaughter machine with the mentality of a battery powered hare, Jason is Death personified. The new Jason, however, takes on some of the characteristics—not surprisingly—of Leatherface from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise. Jason operates in and around Camp Crystal Lake, where he drowned as a youth, like a cunning Viet Cong guerrilla, living in a maze of tunnels with booby-traps galore. Boasting his usual god-like omnipotence, he is tall, dark, and deadly. You never know where he is going to strike and where his weapon of choice will penetrate you.

The problem with the new “Friday” is Nispel disposes of Mrs. Voorhees in the first few moments without giving the dame her due. The Damian Shannon & Mark Swift screenplay doesn’t take place in Camp Crystal Lake, and nobody is trying to refurnish the old campgrounds. Instead, the latest lambs for Jason’s machete are a half-dozen, college-aged hikers searching for marihuana growing wild on Jason’s stomping grounds. This subplot recalls the Leonardo DiCaprio movie “The Beach” where college kids swarmed into a pot field and died at the hands of machine-gun armed natives! Of course, these kids don’t have a clue that they’re trespassing on Jason’s bailiwick. Our deformed killer dispatches them with extreme prejudice in the first 30 minutes. In a throwback to an earlier Jason sequel, he bundles a babe into a sleeping bag and smokes her to death over a fire. Unmistakably, Nispel is paying homage to Jason bashing a girl trapped in a sleeping bag against a tree in “Friday the 13th Part VII—The New Blood” (1988).

In a departure from the norm, Jason takes one of these girls, Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti of “Role Models”), hostage because she reminds him of mom. He keeps her chained up in his subterranean lair. Later, to her credit, Whitney parlays her resemblance to Mrs. Voorhees to her advantage. Whitney’s motorcycle riding brother, Clay (Jared Padelecki of TV’s “Supernatural”), is scouring Camp Crystal Lake for her and handing out missing posters. Clay is reminiscent of Rob in “Friday the 13th Part IV: Jason Lives” (1986) who wanted to kill Jason for slaughtering his sister. Anyway, Clay encounters a group of obnoxious twentysomethings hanging out at a cabin on Crystal Lake. These kids look like they stepped out of a WB soap opera. They are pretty, but bland, except for Asian-American Aaron Yoo of “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist” who provides some comic relief. Eventually, Clay finds Whitney, but by then Jason has appropriated his hockey mask, whittled down virtually nondescript nitwits, and bears down on the hero and heroine. Nispel generates his scares with sudden bursts of deafening music timed with occur with Jason’s sudden appearances. Everything is rather dull when Jason isn’t slashing and gashing his victims. “Pathfinder” lenser Daniel Pearl’s atmospheric photography creates a modicum of mood. Incredibly, Nispel doesn’t take full advantage of Harry Manfredini’s memorable “ch-ch-ch/pa-pa” music. Comparatively, Nispel’s unsubtle remake makes Sean S. Cunningham’s original slasher look Shakespearean.

FILM REVIEW OF ''UNDERWORLD" (2003-British-German-Hungerian-U.S.)

Synthesize elements from famous film franchises like "The Crow," "The Matrix," and "Blade" to forge a bullet-riddled, revisionist vampires-vs.-werewolves urban war epic, and you'll have a pretty good idea what to expect from the exciting, new, fantasy chiller "Underworld" (*** out of ****) starring "Pearl Harbor" beauty Kate Beckinsale. This supercharged but synthetic British horror thriller with R-rated heaps of blood & gore and a touch of Shakespeare plays fast and loose with vampire lore. Not only do the vamps refrain from shape shifting into bats, but also these pale-faced bloodsuckers can stare at their reflections in the mirror! Were that not enough these fangsters don't have to shack up for the day in their caskets. On the other hand, rookie director Len Wiseman and stuntman-turned-scenarist Danny McBride adhere to the lycanthrope legend with no radical departures.

Action-packed from the outset, this darkly-lensed, tragic melodrama laid in a rain swept contemporary setting provides enough different things along the way with a couple of major plot revelations to boost "Underworld" above its formulaic origins. For example, the vampires load their automatic weapons with silver nitrate slugs, while the werewolves pack cartridges filled with ultra-violet light to literally let daylight through their sworn enemies. The special effects sequences that depict the transformation from man into werewolf look super cool, and the sight of these scary creatures hauling butt on the walls in pursuit of their prey make for vivid, memorable images. One especially clever scene shows a werewolf as he uses his bodily powers to pop the bullets out of his wounds!

Although it runs a little over two hours, "Underworld" maintains enough momentum in its melodramatic narrative and features strong enough villains that it entertains you without giving you nightmares. Surprisingly, though it looks like it should have descended from a graphic novel, "Underworld" boasts no previous source material aside from an original story penned by black stuntman-turned-actor Kevin Grevioux, former "Stargate" art director Wiseman, and McBride himself. When the bullets aren't thudding noisily in your ears, "Underworld" features a deafening, industrial-strength, orchestral soundtrack written by ex-Tangerine Dreamer Paul Haslinger with songs written by David Bowie and Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciate. Get ready to rock out!

Kate Beckinsale plays a super-sexy leather-clad vampire warrior named Selene who cannot kill enough werewolves to satisfy her thirst for vengeance. Vampires and werewolves have been fighting a no-holds-barred civil war for centuries, and the vampires finally appear to have gotten the upper hand over the Lycans. According to Selene, these hideous Lycans wiped out her entire family and would have killed her too had it not been for vampire elder Viktor (Bill Nighy of "Hitler's S.S.: Portrait in Evil") who saved her life and turned her into a vampire. Meanwhile, as Viktor rests in his tomb, his hand-picked protégé Craven (Shane Brolly of "Impostor") appears to have turned traitor to his own kind. Secretly, Kraven has been negotiating a truce behind the scenes with the Lycans who are trying to develop a serum which will enable Lycans and vampires to mate.

Naturally, when Selene awakens Viktor and reveals Kraven's insidious plot, all hell breaks loose. Furthermore, it doesn't help matters that the apparently whipped Lycans are far from whipped as Selene learns in an opening shoot-out in a subway tunnel. No, human society doesn't know about the millennium war happening right under their noses, because the vampires and werewolves conceal themselves so well. In fact, the vampires maintain their own blood bank, so they don't have to bleed humans dry. Once a rebellious Selene resurrects Viktor to punish the treacherous Kraven, the action really slams into high gear.

Despite Kraven's assurances to the contrary that the werewolves have been eliminated as a threat, Selene sets out to convince Viktor that the werewolves are staging a comeback. Nothing can stop our hardnosed heroine from proving her point, even if she must turn against her own breed. Apparently, the Lycans have found a human, Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman of "Duets") who can assimilate both vampire and werewolf DNA so as to reproduce. Complications arise when Michael saves Selene's life, and she finds herself attracted to him. In "Underworld,"

Director Len Wiseman, who served as art director not only on the theatrical "Stargate" but also "Independence Day," makes the most of his threadbare $20-million production so that "Underworld" can compete with the films that inspired it. Set amid gloomy, Gothic castles where the elitist vampires huddle in their fight against evil, "Underworld" stresses adrenaline-laced action with just enough time out for the exposition to keep audiences on track about who's who. While the characters aren't as substantial as they could be, each shows a different side as the plot approaches its climax. Selene changes from a mindless werewolf killer from the get-go when she learns the truth about her family and the heroic vampire who saved her from sure death. Tucked away in the flashbacks is another story that revolves around the villainous Viktor that explains his hatred of all things Lycan.

Surprisingly, for a British-produced movie, "Underworld" ignores sex, nudity, and romance in favor of bloodletting and mutilation. Although it cannot compare with "The Crow," "The Matrix," and "Blade," "Underworld"manages nevertheless to carve out a niche of its own, if only because it is a British production. The fact that the Brits were able to produce their own variation on these popular, special effects laden spectacles is reason enough to watch it. Unfortunately, like the vampires here who refuse to countenance interspecies breeding, nearly 90 per cent of American film critics have staked out this well-made thriller because they feel it offers nothing new and lacks the polished production values of those other film franchises. Truth is that getting a large scale action film like "Underworld" made in England by Englishmen amounts to something like a miracle.

While it doesn't look as polished as "The Crow," "The Matrix," or "Blade," "Underworld" still ranks a good horror thriller that you can sink your teeth into and enjoy for its vitality.