Wolf Girl

There's a saying about freak shows and movies featuring Tim Curry: You can't turn away. So it is with this movie, which features both Curry and a freak show. It's not a great movie, by any means, but you can't turn away. The plot involves an oddly attractive extra-hairy teenage girl who has lived her life in a freak show. She meets an odd boy who gives her an experimental treatment, but, as a side effect, the treatment turns her violent. In other words, there are no real surprises in the plot (though it didn't end quite the way I expected it to end), and there are a lot of "what the?" scenes. How did that character know that, why does this character do that, why was this scene in the movie at all, etc. It's an affliction common to made-for-cable movies, of course, and this one actually has less than most. But, beneath all of that, there are some great looking scenes. The scenery, costumes and photography give lots of the movie a neat, old-world sort of feel (even though it appears to take place in the present). Freak shows are an anachronism today, and the movie presents them as such. To watch the scenes around the show, you'd think that the movie took place at least a century ago, and that's to the movie's credit. It's the style that makes this movie worth watching. I've seen plenty of horror movies, made-for-cable and otherwise, that didn't even have that going for them.

I Got this film in one of those cheap 4 movie double disc paks wich i bought mainly for Return of the living dead 3, Unlike the american cover art which seems deceived a lot of people to think this was a werewolf horror flick this had a naked woman looking at her wolf like reflection on a lake and since one of the other movies was the terribly bad Wolfhound(wich instead of having werewolves or even wolves in as the cover deciveingly portraits, it has some crapy dogs and a california playmate pretending to be native irish) i was expecting your average skin flick with some bad werewolf story line, man was i wrong.

Wolf Girl is neither a horror film nor a skin flick, it is a really good drama about the pain of being diferent. The characters are well written with none of them becoming too clishe, it shows how the cruel kids have dark shameful secrets of their own, and it shows the ring master as a real father figure, one that often makes mistakes and acts towards needs and not his childs feelings but truly loves his family. The various segments of the show are quite entertaining and the music is really good. My only real problem is i can't figure out if its ment to be in the present or if they just had some errors, because of the nature of the story and the prduction design it often feels as if its ment to be set around the late sixties early seventies (they even have the good bad and ugly on the marquee on the streets background) but the cosmetics lab looks to modern and then you have shots of the wolf girl walking trougth the street were you can clearly see 90's cars that could have easily been edited out witougth ruining the flow of the scene, I find that really annoying. Overall i liked this film a lot, it just seems to be really bad marketed.

I can't believe how underrated this movie is. Not only does it work with classic horror themes, but it mingles them with a lot of smartness. It is almost perfect, if you discount the Romanian origins of the lead character (mainly, Romanians have not been stupid enough to leave firearms in the hands of regular idiot people for a long time).

The story is of a hairy girl who wants to be normal. She trades her weird looks for a violent personality, driven by her liaison with a regular freak (not violent and sensible) and the continuous bullying by another freak and his clique. The cast is mixed: Earthsea's Shawn Ashmore, Tim Curry (from a zillion movies) and Grace Jones work together with the Romanian cast that provided most of the secondary and support actors.

It's not that the movie is a masterpiece, but it is quite good with its depiction of freakness in all of its forms. The idea itself was masterful. I've watched the movie thinking it would be a werewolf film, but in actuality it is not, it is a story about human nature and should, by all counts, become a classic.

Do watch it. It may not be high production values or insane special effects, but the story is something to behold.

I think a lot of people didn't understand the message that was supposed to come through. The girl was unique but wanted to be look normal so bad that she turned into what people thought she was to begin with. A wild animal. All the "normal" teenagers had something about them that was out of the norm but looked completely normal on the outside. I think it sends a good message. If you twist your self up trying to be like everybody else instead of yourself you end up killing pieces of your humanity. A lot of people watched this film and assumed they the movie makers where making fun of a very real syndrome. I truly believe that if a person pays close attention to the message in the movie that they will enjoy a fine piece of imagination.

It would seem that Tim Curry would welcome the role of a kind-hearted, singing, dancing sideshow entrepreneur, roving through the European woods in a gypsy caravan. He seems to be enjoying himself greatly being able to be the understanding father figure to the physically impaired entertainers who also seem to be enjoying their work. It is also a coming-of-age story. Most teenage girls seem to think of themselves as grotesque until love is in the air. I had a little trouble with the ending. Without giving it away I can say that, with a good character, sometimes it's best to leave well enough alone. I give it 10 points, so there.