Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF  (2001)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Christophe Gans
    Samuel Le Bihan, Vincent Cassel, Émilie Dequenne,
    Monica Bellucci, Jérémie Renier, Mark Dacascos
Try to imagine the pitch for this. It's a historical romance/costume adventure, see, with a monster and martial arts. The heroes are these two guys with long hair and three-cornered hats and these real cool-looking long leather coats, and one of them's this dashing explorer/doctor/gardener/libertine/naturalist/taxidermist type, and the other's some kind of Iroquois/Mohawk Indian, the only survivor from his tribe (think "Last of the Mohicans"), so you got this colonial thing going, only the movie's not set in the colonies, it's back in France, before the Revolution, and it's in French, which means in the States it'll have subtitles, but that won't matter, because Americans, you know, as long as you got a lot of guys beating the shit out of each other, they're not going to care what anybody's talking about anyway. The monster's this giant, hideous wolf, see, only it's really a wolf in a spiky leather harness that looks pretty fakey the closer you get to it, so we don't get up close with the monster till the third hour, at least. Did I say it was going to be long? It's going to be long. So the wolf goes around killing people and these different army units and gangs of peasants go after the wolf, and there's a lot of slow motion/fast motion/freeze frame stuff, especially with all the bone-crunching kung fu kicking and killing going on, and there's this evil cult and a guy with one arm who makes his own silver bullets and a prostitute on a mission from the pope, and people die, but only some of them come back to life, and by the end even the most brain-fried stoner out there will know that none of it makes much sense, but by then it'll be too late to ask for their money back and we're home free. Whaddya think?