Blood and Chocolate (the movie)

Title: Blood and Chocolate, adapted from a YA novel by Annette Curtis Klause.
Rating: PG-13
Director: Katja von Garnier

Holy crap, this was a stinkbomb of a movie.

Synopsis:
First off, this barely adheres to the book at all. In fact, the only things that haven’t been changed are the names.

Vivian is a young woman who is a loup-garoux (not werewolf, people, we need a foreign term for a cool effect). She lived in America with her family when she was a young girl, but werewolf hunters killed her parents and she was sent to Romania to live with her aunt. The film fast fowards to her being a legal adult, making it that much easier for endless shots of her drinking at a club with atrocious music and/or getting hit on by her uncle. Who wants to take her as his mate. Yep, you read that right. Vivian isn’t looking forward to it, and generally pouts and sulks until she meets an American tourist who is studying loup-garoux for his upcoming graphic novel. They develop a relationship shown mainly through sloppy montage, and of course her uncle and the rest of her pack finds out. Needless to say, interspecial relationships is strictly verboten, and the two star-crossed lovers must decide whether they love each other enough to break the rules and risk death at the hands (paws?) of the pack.

That is the streamlined version; there are some subplots and details I left out, but they’re irrelevant. The movie is very convoluted but shallow at the same time, and unfortunately not very cohesive.

The acting:
Heh. Hehehehe. Okay, to be fair, I’d just watched Pan’s Labyrinth before this movie, so Blood’s actors are going to automatically suffer in comparison. With that said, the acting was pretty bad. The actress who plays Vivian does nothing but stare and pout. Her uncle hits on her. Pout. She remembers her parents’ death. Pout. She makes chocolate candies. Pout. It got very old very fast.

Her uncle, Gabriel, has a garbled accent of indistinct nationality, like part French and part I-just-had-a-root-canal-and-can’t-feel-the-left-side-of-my-mouth. And man, how did they manage to make the actor who played Gabriel (Olivier Martinez) unsexy? I saw him in Taking Lives, and while that movie had its own issues, you couldn’t deny that Martinez was hot in it. In this movie, he’s sporting what looks like a bad dye job and hair that has been cleaned with grease instead of water for the last three months. Superficialities aside, he really didn’t fit the role; he couldn’t project the menace and strength that an alpha werewolf should have had. Someone like Russell Crowe would have worked much better, but then again someone like Russell Crowe wouldn’t sign up for a C-grade movie like this.

Vivian’s human love interest, Aiden, had the best role. Or at least the actor that played him did the most with it. Since he didn’t play a werewolf (which in this movie means solemn stares and the inability to crack a smile), he was able to put some actual cheerfulness into his character. He had this geeky scruffiness that made him stand out — in a good way.

There were other minor characters, but they aren’t really notable in any way. They all blurred together after a while.

The dialogue:
Horrible. Part of the reason why I think the actors did such a bad job was because they had bad material to work with. Some samples that I can remember off-hand:

“You’re only running from you.”

“He’s a special find. Medium-rare.”

“And she’s developed a growing attraction with him?” (That last one was spoken by Gabriel, and with his funky accent, it sounded more like, “She’s developed a groin attraction with him?”)

Yeah. It speaks for itself.

The special effects:
I’m not exactly a special effects junkie, so I can’t comment on the technical aspect. I do like that the loup-garoux transformed into actual wolves. I know that pissed a lot of people off, and started a lot of criticism that it was a cheap move to save money and time with real wolves instead of developing a monster man version. Meh.

Things that annoyed me:
The fact that the werewolf traditions had no basis. By that I mean they didn’t follow the ways of a true wolf pack or the ways of typical human culture. Gabriel, the alpha male, takes a new mate every seven years? Why? Because “it’s tradition”. WHOSE tradition? Wolves mate for life. Some human cultures accept the idea of multiple wives for a husband, but I’ve never heard of a culture that switches out a wife every seven years. So…where did it come from? Aside from the Land Of Plot Convenience, that is.

And the wolf hunts. There are two periods in the movie where the wolves hunt a human. In the first hunt, Gabriel, the alpha, doesn’t even join the hunt until it’s almost over, much less lead it or direct it, as a real alpha wolf would. Even in the second hunt, when he does join the hunt from the beginning, the wolves never act as a pack. They all hunt separately or at the most in pairs, which doesn’t happen with a real wolf pack.

And finally, the shirt stripping, also related to the hunts. At the beginning of the hunt, the loup-garoux are still in human form, gathered around the chosen prey. Now, the kicker is that as they get ready to chase their prey, they begin to take their clothes off…to a certain point. The women take their jackets off. The young men with the fat-free abs take off their shirts. I understand that since it’s a PG-13 rating, nudity isn’t going to be allowed. But it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem anyway, since when they do finally change they seem to have no problem with the rest of their clothing. So why have them take anything off in the first place?

I know, I know, I’m probably thinking way too much about this, but when a movie is so bad that it can’t entertain me, I find new entertainment by ripping its inconsistencies to shreds.

Anyway, my final opinion on the movie is that it’s really not worth shelling out money for. I was really disappointed, since I haven’t found a good werewolf movie since The Company Of Wolves. Damn it, someone’s gotta get it right eventually.