THE COMPANY OF WOLVES Isn't About Company or Wolves

[Warning: For this review, I took the places where there'd usually be comedy and replaced it with intelligence. I did it because "smart" is the new sexy. And comedy is the old "fat."]

Every now and then the Shocktober Spectacular tries to outsmart me. I hate it when it does that and I really wish it’d stop. When I’m watching a horror movie, I want to see Jason take something, preferably Manhattan, and I want to see him take it from naked girls and stereotypically jive-talking black guys with red leather jackets and boom boxes on their shoulders. With that said, when I’m in college, I’d prefer it if Jason didn’t walk into my class and try to machete me. The point is, I don’t want my horror movies to teach me anything just like I don’t want my PSYC 101 class to try to kill me.

Check out that movie poster. If you put that picture on your movie’s box, your movie goddamned well better be a horror movie. The Company of Wolves is not a horror movie...it's the scariest type of movie of them all…the metaphor. It’s even the worst kind of metaphor because it’s a metaphor that poses as a horror movie. That’s like seeing what’s obviously a Nintendo game under the tree on Christmas, and then unwrapping it and finding out its Winter Games. Thanks, Grandma. I'd rather've gotten fucking socks.

The Company of Wolves is a modern (read: 1984) take on Little Red Riding Hood. It centers around a pretty girl who is obsessed with the occult, and, more specifically, werewolves. Not helping the matter is her grandmother, who is constantly telling her werewolf-related stories. Each time she does, the movie cuts away from the main story and shows the events of the grandmother's story as its being told. The first story is about a boy who tries to buy a love potion from a mysterious traveling stranger (The Phantom Menace’s General Zod): a potion that ends up turning him into a wolf. The second story is told by the girl herself, about a pregnant Victorian wench who crashes her baby’s daddy’s wedding-day party and gets revenge by turning the hoity-toity attendees into wolves*. The movie ends with Steven Tyler, pictured above, seducing the lead girl, then turning into a werewolf, and then carrying the girl away with a band of wolves, who, I’m assuming, were all also once metal singers too.

* In all my years of trying to be funny, this intended-to-be-serious sentence is probably the funniest thing I’ve ever typed.

In its defense, The Company of Wolves is an absolutely beautiful film. The movie is hazy, mystic, and dreamlike, and with its shattering porcelain head decapitations and bird eggs that hatch tiny human babies, it totally wins this year's “what the mother fuck?!” award. The Company of Wolves was an abstract artistic masterpiece--a smart, clever, and dare I say genius film that, in it’s time, received loads of critical acclaim. Unfortunately, this is the Shocktober Spectacular, where we money shot all over critical acclaim’s face. Alas, it’s time for my review’s shocking twist ending.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “film metaphor,” think Signs. Signs was advertised through and through as an alien movie. The truth is, the alien ad campaign was just a gimmick to get people into the theatres. Signs is as much about aliens as The Warriors was. Signs is really a movie about a misdirected preacher’s redemption of faith, but NOBODY would’ve went to go see it if it was advertised as such. And The Company of Wolves isn’t about werewolves. It’s about…well...

In tonight's (HALLOWEEN NIGHT'S!) movie, werewolf-ism (a word?) was a metaphor for the onset of adulthood in our heroine. Consider that once a month, there's a “full moon" that turns werewolves, otherwise normal people, into frightful monsters. Sound familiar? The tip-off was when, at the beginning of the film, the heroine was said to be "in bed with cramps.” My acting teacher once stated so correctly that "every single thing, no matter how little it is, appears in a movie for a reason." In the endless writes and re-writes, the word "cramps" could've just as easily been "a cold," or "mumps" or "the herp," but it wasn't. It was "cramps." Plus, the running thread of the main story of the movie was some boy who was obsessing over the girl, and her hemming and hawing about whether or not to give in to his advances. Each "side story" that was told was somehow sexually themed, and they both ended with the characters turning into wolves—or suffering—as a result of their "adult" choices or actions. Werewolves are scary. For the teenager, adulthood—more specifically, the acceptance of responsibility that come with it—is also frightening.


If you're looking at this picture right now, you're totally learning about the birds and the bees.

The knockout punch of my interpetation comes at the end of the movie, when the wolves swarm the girl’s cottage. The film makes a point of showing them tearing up her room and trashing all her shit. I think this destruction of all her childhood trinkets represents the onset of womanhood. She’s fallen for the abovementioned boy, no matter how much she doesn’t want to admit it to herself: she kicks and screams as the pack of wolves overwhelm her and carry her off. Face it girl…from now on out it’s gonna be guys, not dolls. It sucks. I distinctly remember the day when I stopped playing with G.I. Joes and got into girls. Last Tuesday.

Aw...aw...awwww yeah, bitches! You like that? You like that? Don't think for one second that just because I have more Transformers toys sitting on my computer than I have girls' phone numbers in my phone that I won't drop some science on your ass in a second, because I will. I am SO on to you, The Company of Wolves. You think I’m not, but I am. Audition tried to pull this same shit last year, and you saw what I did to it.

Fuck you, film metaphor. I’m your worst nightmare, and you are my bitch.