La marca del lobo

This movie is actually very good for the first 20 minutes or so. The director is mechanical (German, you know) but the introductory parts are stylish. After that, this becomes something barely worthy of after school teen fodder.

These things often depend on the fact of dual identities, and stories are based on problems coming from that dual identity. This is no different: girl-wolf falls in love with regular boy. There's some irrelevant business about the leader of the pack. Ho hum. Do we ever doubt the outcome? They often also depend on the actual cinematic magic of transformation. But what we have here is about 70 years behind in special effects.

What brought me to this was the rather delicious notion of the two fluids. Our haunted teen girl works in a chocolate shop. I don't know the book makes of this. It has amazing cinematic promise. But the film includes her chocolate job only in a cursory way. The supposed sex appeal is so lacking in sex, even that's gone.

This director sits as a judge for the Berlin film festival? Wow.

There is an interesting character, that appears in only a few scenes and has no lines. The deal is that leader of the pack remarries every seven years. The main women characters are the wife before the current one, and our teen girl who is the designated next one. Some of the scant story is in the tension between these two. One woman abandoned and the second one an unwilling bride. The interesting one is the inbetween one.

I'm interested in films that feature Absinthe. This is one. The werewolves drink it ("some people think its poison") and later are literally burned by it. Usually when it appears as it does here, everything afterward could be considered a hallucination. It could be here, but the filmmaker surely did not intent that ambiguity.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.