Blood and Chocolate (2007)

by Rizzy

I need to start off this review by saying I like werewolves. I love werewolf movies.  I really love horror films and I REALLY wanted to like this film a lot.  I wanted to roll about in the cheesy badness and sing praises to it's AWESOMELY bad nature. But, alas, this film was not even AWESOMELY bad.  No, not at all, it was mostly just boring.  And thus I'm going to start off the Bview by referring you to my Blood and Chocolate Drinking Game so that you may find more joy in the film than I did. I'm pretty sure a 6-pack could have turned this film from blah to Boozalarious!!

First of all, this is one of the werewolves... when did they become so slim and non bulky? They all look more like vampires in my opinion than werewolves, because they are all slender and slinky. This entire film really felt like they were trying to remake the werewolf version of Underworld except as an afterschool special... and with no action. Even the werewolves look like vampires straight out of Underworld!! Werewolves tend to normally be bulkier in stature to reflect their beast within. Not these guys. Theses guys look like a twig could blow them over.

OK, so the most exciting thing about watching a werewolf movie is for that scene where you finally get to watch the human form turn into the werewolf. So when we FINALLY get to a clear shot of it in the movie how disappointed am I that it's this? A lame ass light show. Seriously, they turn into a beam of light and then come out as a wolf. And they are just normal wolfs, too, not anything special. Lame. Completely lame.

And then there was the jumping, oh God the jumping!! Seriously, who ever decided that instead of having action in this movie they should just replace it with lots and lots and lots of jumping, should be shot. Any time something exciting was happening they'd show someone jumping and then they'd cut and show them falling/landing. Seriously. No good choreography, just lots and lots of jumping. And I'm not even talking about a lot of cool jumping, like free runners (people who run up walls in urban settings as shown in the Youtube video below), but just a lot of long, slow-motion jumping. (Oh, and don't think I've forgotten about you, Mr. Slow Motion fun... I'm getting to you in just a second.

They did some free running in the movie, but more they just hinted at it/had it in the background. When they did put it in, it was in awkward places. Most often it just looked lame and not needed.  How many times can I say lame this Bview? At least about a dozen more. Lame. Lame. Lame. Lame. Lame. Lame. Lame.  Lame. Lame. Lame. Lame. Lame. And I still don't think I've said it enough yet. The few times they did show what could be cool Free running, they hid it behind so much set and with cool camera angles/choppy editing so that you still didn't really get to enjoy it.

And now we come to my next pet peeve in this film. Slow motion. This entire film like they got to the end of filming and said "Shit, we only filmed about 45 minutes worth of footage and we want to make a 90 minute film! Whatever are we going to do?  And then someone said, "You know what! I have an AMAZING idea!! Look at how awesome slowing things down makes them look! The Matrix was huge and they had slow motion shots all the time! Why don't we just slow everything down and our film will be gold!" And so that is what they did and you know what? Slowing things down did make it longer! Now it doesn't feel like 45 minutes of footage, it feels like 3 hours worth of footage. And about 75% of that is jumping and another 20% of that is the same 3 basic plot scenes replayed over and over again "building up" tension to the ending.

Oh, God, the ending. Apparently they took a clue from Peter Jackson, too, cause they decided that one ending wasn't enough for them. Nope, they come to a nice little spot where a perfectly happy ending could have happened and then they decide to instead of end it, they launch a new story arch for us to suffer through.

The thing that made this movie truly unbearable though was not the jumping, nor the slow motion, not even the bad graphics, but the fact that this wasn't really a werewolf movie at all.  Nope, it was really a bad TV drama pretending to be a werewolf movie. With characters that you only really partially like and overdramatic emo goodness all around.  Really you don't feel a reason why the main character feels a need to stay from the start and so there is no tension building, cause you keep thinking "just leave." So yea, please, drink while you watch this, chat, something to pass the time, cause this movie moved so slow, I could cry.