The Company of Wolves

1984 werewolf funk

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Angela Lansbury helps a teenage girl lose her innocence by telling her inappropriate stories about werewolf sex.

The goth kids might like this one. Neil Jordan's werewolf movie is a very English fractured fairy tale, dirty in a prim and proper way. It's got its share of frolicking. Bits of this gag you with its pretensions. From the start, it's very stylish, but it almost looks like it's an extraordinarily stylish televised movie instead of a theatrical release. The music is really awful, and the symbolism (animals in nearly every scene and more phallic symbols than necessary) is a little goofy. But there's still stuff to like in this. The dialogue is peppered with some subtle dark humor. It didn't make me howl or anything, but it did help this seem not-so-serious. Some of the setting imagery is really good, foggy swamps and gnarled things that look like they came straight outta Tim Burton's wet dreams. I never did decide whether I liked the special effects or not. I'll give credit for the interesting werewolf transformations. Lots of creativity there. The effects to make that happen don't look real at all, but they're still pretty cool.

Question: When did close-ups of doll heads become a horror movie cliche?