A bold fantasy horror tale with sexual overtones from director Neil Jordan that crosses Legend of the Werewolf with Red Riding Hood.
An inconsistent pace is sometimes as torpid as the bizarre, almost medieval background music, and not all the acting matches that of Angela Lansbury’s faintly evil Granny in quality, who enjoys terrorising her beautiful adolescent granddaughter, Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) with grim and sexy stories of wolves and is destined to come to a sticky end.
During an erotic confrontation between the wolf and a surprisingly willing Rosaleen she is so taken with the creature (sensuously played by Micha Bergese, a dancer with the Mantis ballet company) that she doesn’t seem to care that he has just beheaded naughty old granny.
The special effects are gruesomely vivid, and the film successfully creates a fairytale horror environment inhabited by wolves, snakes, polecats, owls and toads, hopping, prowling and slithering round the crooked houses of the forest.
An early sequence with the heroine’s sister being pursued by wolves through a nightmare toyland is the most fully realised, although the settings throughout are vividly – if gloomily – imaginative in the Caligari style.
Granny
Angela Lansbury
Father
David Warner
Old Priest
Graham Crowden
Young Bride
Kathryn Pogson
Young Groom
Stephen Rea
Mother
Tusse Silberg
Huntsman
Micha Bergese
Rosaleen
Sarah Patterson
Alice
Georgia Slowe
Amorous Boy’s Father
Brian Glover
Amorous Boy’s Mother
Susan Porrett
Amorous Boy
Shane Johnstone
Witch Woman
Dawn Archibald
Wealthy Groom
Richard Morant
Wolfgirl
Danielle Dax
Devil Boy
Vincent McClaren
Dowager
Ruby Buchanan
Ancient
Jimmy Gardner
Eyepatch
Roy Evans
Lame Fiddler
Edward Marksen
Blind Fiddler
Jim Brown
Director
Neil Jordan
