MOVIE EXECUTIVE: That Twilight book is huge right now, and they're coming out with a movie soon. Teen girls are swooning! These supernatural romances are so hot. Is there another teen supernatural book that we can make into a highly profitable film?
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Well, there's this book called Blood & Chocolate...MOVIE EXEC: Does it have a human and a supernatural creature falling in love?
PRODUCTION MAN: Yes.
MOVIE EXEC: Does it have a love triangle?
PRODUCTION MAN: Yes, absolutely.
MOVIE EXEC: Do the human and the supernatural creature run off together, surviving the disapproval of both their worlds, you know just like Romeo and Juliet?
PRODUCTION MAN: Uh, well, no. Not exactly.
MOVIE EXEC: Oh no! We'll have to change that - teens love that forbidden love stuff! Well, does it at least have a message that the main female is only important as an object of male affection?
PRODUCTION MAN: Actually no! She learns to accept herself first, before she-
MOVIE EXEC: No no no! That's no good! No good at all! Call the script writer- we're gonna' need some changes!
Yes, this is Blood & Chocolate, a film released to poach the Twilight fan craze, and which created loathing amongst fans of the original YA book... and loathing amongst fans of decent film.
Part of the reason this review has been so delayed is because I must have started and stopped the first half of this movie about three times, each time wondering if it was too late to switch my movie list before anyone noticed. This film is painfully problematic, sappy, and cliched. This is true even without any knowledge of the changes the movie made to the book's original plot. However, I also feel that awareness of those changes is helpful in understanding what is wrong with this film, so I'll be using (parentheticals) in order to point out drastic changes between the movie and its source material. So strap in, paint your nails, and channel your inner teenage girl: this is going to be a rough movie ride.
Our movie starts with TERRIBLY filmed flashback, similar in look to a first year film student's semester project, of a little girl's parents getting murdered by... someone. The jumpy camera work makes this scene incredibly unclear.
We then cut to Romania (the book took place entirely in the United States, Maryland) several years later. The little girl, named Vivian, is now a seventeen year-old who is the only Romanian resident who seems to have an American accent. Not that anyone else has a Romanian accent - most of the other characters sound French or British, actually. But that aside - Vivian has been raised by her aunt in Romania after her parents' deaths, and it soon becomes clear that Vivian and her entire family are part of a large tribe of werewolves. Werewolves who go to large outdoor nightclubs and drink absinthe.
 |
| Isn't this what you would do as a werewolf? |
Seriously, there is so much absinthe drinking in this film. Our protagonist Vivian sits around and pouts a lot, seemingly disgusted with many other werewolves around her, including her cousin, because they all seem too blood-thirsty. When she is not pouting, drinking absinthe, and looking sullen, Vivian alternates between working in a chocolate shop and "running" around the city with her werewolf powers.
 |
| Werewolves have the power of parkour |
We soon find out that there is a werewolf prophesy about a female werewolf who will bring balance to the Force, ahem, I mean to the werewolf civilization and that the leader of the Romanian werewolves, named Gabriel, thinks Vivian is this special werewolf. Therefore, even though he is her uncle by marriage (not the case in the book) and looks to be over forty (he's about twenty-four or twenty-five in the book) he wants to marry Vivian. And so Vivian is "promised" to him, and she seems less than pleased about it. But then, Vivian seems less than pleased about everything.
 |
| This is Vivian being sullenly sullen |
Soon, Vivian meets another American named Aiden, who is a comic-book writer and artist (just another teen in the book, and one who is kind of a hippie; also it is worth noting that the actor who plays the "American" Aiden in the movie is actually British, which is mildly odd) who has come to Romania to work on a comic about "loup garou" (yes, they use the French terminology... I think the movie forgot they were in Romania). Vivian finds Aiden intriguing, though she stays sullen looking and barely shows it, and he seems to like and pursue her for no logical reason. Despite lots of her resisting his charm, they finally fall into one of the sappiest "going on dates and being lovey dovey" montage I've ever seen.
Fans of amazing television may recognize Aiden, on the left, as Hugh Dancy, one of the leads in the NBC show Hannibal. I will take a moment to say that Hannibal is one of the most powerfully acted television shows I've ever seen, and much of that comes from Hugh Dancy in his role of a semi-autistic FBI agent who is slowly losing his mind. Dancy is clearly a very subtle and intense actor... which you would not know for 70% of this movie. During the whole first half, they really didn't need an actor at all. What they really needed was a Ryan Gosling meme.
Neither Vivian or Aiden have much of a "character" to them; Vivian just changes from emotionally "not in love" to "in love," and we don't learn much else about her in the process. Similarly, Aiden is just a bundle of romance movie cliches who tells Vivian what she needs to hear in order to find him "dreamy." It's actually extremely painful to watch.
Along the way, we also get hints from the werewolf community about werewolf rules ("Don't reveal yourself to humans... If man suspects we are still here, he will exterminate us") and that there have been humans who have hunted werewolves in the past. Therefore, when some of the werewolves find out about Aiden and Viviant's relationship, Gabriel sends Vivian's cousin to scare off Aiden. This scene lands the two men in an old Romanian church and, wow, okay, this scene is actually pretty neat looking.
After a whole movie of awful camera choices, sappy love montages, and awkward scene transitions, this scene is authentically emotional, creepy, and suspenseful, which was a real shock. I could actually feel the tension in this scene as the young werewolf tries to scare Aiden off. This confrontation leads to a fight and Aiden scratching Vivian's cousin, causing the cousin's eyes to shift yellow and reveal his werewolf nature. Aiden naturally freaks out as the cousin tries to kill/silence him, leaving Aiden seemingly no choice but to defend himself. Our supposedly uncoordinated comic book artist somehow manages to kill Vivian's cousin with a silver star pendant... and the look on his face, as he realizes not only that werewolves are real but that he has killed his girlfriend's relative, is actually powerful. This is the best scene in the whole movie, even if the fight itself was pretty cheesy, and the first time we get to see Hugh Dancy actually acting.
This is an excellent time to pause, though, and clarify something else terrible about this movie: the werewolf transformation. Essentially, there isn't one. While most werewolf movies have gore-filled shifts with cracking bones and bulging faces, the teen-girl-friendly Blood & Chocolate just has the werewolves "glow" a bit, and suddenly they are wolves. It is ridiculously cheesy and up there with "sparkling vampires" as a ridiculous interpretation of the supernatural genre for teens. When Teen Wolf (any version) has a better transformation sequence, you know a movie has a problem.
 |
| Who says vampires are the only ones who can sparkle? |
But back to the good stuff: Aiden confronts Vivian about being a werewolf and yells at her saying, "If you cared anything about me, you would have left me as soon as we met." Aiden is clearly fearful of Vivian and what she is, and he tells her he is fleeing the country. Once again, this scene allows for some actual acting on Hugh Dancy's part, and it is one of the most tolerable scenes in the film.
However, the werewolves capture Aiden at the train station (this never happens in the book), and he is dragged back to the werewolf pack to be hunted (this never happens in the book). Gabriel especially wants Aiden dead, since the boy he killed was his son (which is not the case in the book). The werewolves all glow/sparkle and turn into their wolf form and give chase.
Soon, Gabriel has Aiden cornered and is about to kill him, but Aiden is rescued by a mysterious white wolf who turns out to be Vivian. However, in his fear, Aiden scratches her with silver, causing her to become ill (still not in the original story). Aiden feels terribly for hurting Vivian, and so forgives her for, uh, being a werewolf I guess. And so the love-struck couple goes on the run, hoping to escape the werewolves and run off to somewhere in Europe together. The conflict ends with Vivian killing Gabriel (oh no, that in no way happens in the book, as I'll explain) and Aiden and Vivian agreeing to go to Paris together. Cue happy love song as the human and the werewolf drive off into the sunset together.
The ending of this film is sappy, unoriginal, and ultimately predictable from a Hollywood standpoint. Twilight, Underworld, and countless shows like True Blood, Being Human, The Vampire Diaries, and even Buffy have the "forbidden love" of human and supernatural creature plotline. However, fans of the original Blood & Chocolate book likely expected something different. You see, the original book was seemingly all about subverting that trope.
In the book, the teen Vivian sees love with a human as appealing because it seems simple and unknown, as well as forbidden. However, in the book, Aiden never gets over his fear and rejection of her, and she ultimately realizes that she needs to love herself as a werewolf. She therefore ends up with the head of her pack, Gabriel, by her own choice and chooses loyalty to who she really is over an idealized idea of love. It is literally the opposite message from what the film promotes. Even more confusing, in the love triangle, Vivian ends up with the opposite person in the triangle than she does in the source material. It would be if the Twilight movies had Bella end up with Jacob rather than Edward; fans would riot. I understand why Hollywood would want to make the more "traditional" choice, but that means that they actively changed a fairly original plot to something much, much worse and predictable. Which is fairly maddening.
Taken on its own, the Blood & Chocolate movie has a few good moments, mostly in thanks to small glimpses of Hugh Dancy's acting skills. However, mostly it is just a painfully terrible film. It has a mediocre script, awkward transitions, flat characters, odd accents which make no sense with the (bizarrely chosen) Romanian landscape, and just terrible film-making choices.
It may not have been the worst film I've watched for this werewolf series, but it is certainly one of the hardest to sit through from start to finish. I literally can't think of anyone I would recommend this movie to; fans of the book would hate it, and fans of decent movies would likely hate it as much if not more so. In general, skip this teenage romance story. No matter your age, you deserve something a bit more grown up.
Rating: 1 out of 5 bites
No comments:
Post a Comment