Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

Director: Christophe Gans

Starring: Samuel Le Bihan, Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci

More info: IMDb

Plot: In 18th century France, the Chevalier de Fronsac and his native American friend Mani are sent by the King to the Gevaudan province to investigate the killings of hundreds by a mysterious beast.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? Nah

#29 of 31 Days of Horror 2010.

BotW suffers from it's excessive run time (152 minutes for the director's cut - what I watched - 10 minutes longer than the theatrical cut). It looks gorgeous. You really get a sense of time and place. It's just that when you combine that with modern camera tricks and martial arts (and then some), it took me out of the film on a few occasions.


It's my fault for thinking this was a werewolf movie. I just assumed. Even still, I liked the idea of the killer beast but it seemed like an awfully long way to go for the bad guys to build up and perpetuate such a thing. Surely there would have been much easier and less time-consuming ways of achieving what they wanted, right? About an hour and a half in I hit the display button to see how much was left since it looked like it could wrap up in the next twenty minutes. Fuck me sideways...more than an hour to go and it's that last hour that really started to take its toll on me. I liked Le Bihan in the lead. He's very charismatic but the film gets to feeling so heavy that even he couldn't save it.