Hey folks, Harry here... When Universal opens this French can of whupass onto your local screen, I hope to God that you get out there and behold a magnificient creation. This isn't a straight Horror film. It's a period action adventure martial arts romance horror flick! And Mani is a character that you women will squeeze your thighs over, and guys... You'll go, "FUCKING A!!!!" when he unleashes Indian wrath upon peasants and assorted dumbshits. He rules! Check out Prankster's review...

LE PACTE DES LOUPS (The Brotherhood of the Wolf)

Directed by Christophe Gans, Starring Samuel Le Bihan, Marc Dacascos

I was going to do a package of horror film reviews, since the last 5 films I've seen at the Toronto FilmFest have all been horror flicks of one kind or another. But this one deserves a separate review. Guess what? The Devil's Backbone is NOT the best foreign genre/horror flick to emerge from this years' festival.

Some time before the French Revolution, the provincial French town of Gavaunais was menaced by a mysterious Beast. The King's investigator dragged home the carcass of a huge wolf, but that didn't stop the killings. That much is fact, or at least popular legend. This film tells the story of naturologist Gregoire de Fronsac (Le Bihan), just returned from the war in New France, who, with his Iroquois companion Mani (Dacascos), digs deeper into the legend and finds... not what they were expecting.

Ooooh boy. Harry's going to love this one. [HARRY NOTE: YO! PRANKSTER! CLICK HERE BUDDY BOY, I REVIEWED THIS FUCKING AWESOME FILM A WHILE BACK!!!! IT RULES!]Hopefully a lot of you guys will too.

Take Sleepy Hollow. Remove most of the (numerous) flaws and add a story that actually has some coherence, plus more genuine scares.

Then throw in martial arts.

Then add a kickass Native American, lots of weird editing (like a less epileptic Baz Luhrman), a more epic plotline, and dub the whole thing in French. Voila.

Three thoughts war for headspace while watching most scenes in this film:

"This is SO FREAKIN‚ COOL!!"

"This is the most ridiculous thing ever."

"Wow... never seen THAT before."

The comparison to Sleepy Hollow is quite unavoidable. This movie is set in the 1700s in a remote, eerie town being menaced by a seemingly supernatural killer. A young investigator, a man of science who also represents governmental authority, shows up to get to the bottom of it, and encounters a conspiracy among the town leaders and clues that the evil force may be directed by an evil human will.

He also falls in love with the daughter of an important man in town, and gains a young companion who helps him solve the mystery.

If this sounds TOO close for your liking, rest assured that this film is a thing of beauty for genre fans. Every choice that Sleepy Hollow muffed, Brotherhood gets exactly right.

Well, maybe not exactly. This movie does retain the over-the-top nature of a Hammer film. It's loud, sexy, drenched in gore, and doesn't hold back with the expressionist film editing. And, oh yeah, there's kung fu.

But given all that, it's handled in about as slick and intelligent a fashion possible. Director Gans knows ALL the canards, clichés, and assumptions genre fans will make going in, and he plays our brains like damaged harpsichords. The word 'werewolf' (loup-garou) is very carefully avoided until quite a ways in. The word 'wolf' is in the title. So it MUST be a werewolf movie.

Right?

Well, I'm not telling. It's actually one of the many, many mysteries and reversals of this film. I'm not saying it's NOT a werewolf movie, either; merely that Gans keeps us wondering without calling attention to the fact that we're wondering. I will say this, though: the movie's mythology is a lot more imaginative than we're used to seeing in American horror films, even good ones. It's deep and involved and amazingly literate.

Another thing that doesn't happen for a long while is the appearance of The Beast. And, amazingly enough, it doesn't bother you. This movie has a lot of things on its mind, and is about far more than the standard "hunt the monster in an isolated location". It also deals with certain fundamentals of human nature without the pat and clichéd homilies of a standard werewolf film.

Not that I'm saying it IS a werewolf film.

But what will rock you where you sit, even as you giggle at the silliness of it all, are the inventive and elaborate action scenes. They're so much the better for being played out against the canvas of human relationships and buried secrets - again, unlike Sleepy Hollow, the mystery actually means something. So when the Beast first appears, there's a genuine impact - which is shortly followed by the AMAZING scene where Fronsac and Mani finally put their plan into action and attempt to strike back against the Beast.

Yet another element this movie has over Hollow is the idea that maybe the scientist has the right idea, and maybe human ingenuity CAN triumph over this seemingly implacable critter. It makes it a LOT easier to root for the characters knowing they're not going to split up and wander off down dark corridors, and that when they go after the Beast they're going to be damned good and ready.

And the fight scenes. When two of them (both involving Mani, who says little and lays the smackdown on much) appeared in the first 20 minutes, I was a tad doubtful, especially since they're photographed in "arty" slo-mo and slightly Gladiator-ish flurry cuts. And how do you fight a Beast barehanded, even if you're a Black Belt? Isn't this a werewolf movie? (Not that I'm saying it ISN'T.)

And while big, portentious fight sequences will always have an element of cheese, they're handled here in such a cheerfully insane yet non-detractive way that you can't help but grin like an idiot when they start to come into play in the later half of the movie. (And thank Buddha, everyone here OBEYS THE FRICKIN‚ LAWS OF PHYSICS when they tussle.)

The performances are all round good, Le Bihan makes for an affable hero who's both capable and smart, Emilie Dequenne is so cute it hurts my brain, and Dacascos... well, although there's the occasional slip into "Noble Savage" cliché, largely due to the character's limited dialogue, there's little doubt that Mani is the coolest Indian ever to grace a genre film. He's devilishly smart, he conveys passion with a glance, he kicks ass and takes names, and I'm not 100% sure but I think he might be the first Native American character in the history of film to actually get laid. ("Chief giving his daughter to the hero in marriage" doesn't count.)

What can I say about this film? It's the horror buff's answer to Crouching Tiger. It's a monster movie by David Lean. I'm trying not to oversell, but I don't think anyone who's reading this is going to regret tracking down this film at whatever farflung independent theater it ends up playing in. It goes beyond being the best horror flick I've seen in a long time.

Not that I'm saying it isn't.

Prankster