Review of Blood Moon (2014) by James H — 17 Jun 2009

At first, I was dreading the arrival of this film from Netflix. I thought it was going to be another generic low-budget werewolf movie, but to my surprise, Wolf Girl (it's original title. I refuse to refer to it by it's dumbed down DVD release title) manages to be a VERY unique horror drama that is a cross between Tod Browning's Freaks and Lucky McKee's May.

The story is a about a wolf girl (played by the beautiful Victoria Sanchez), a deformed youth with mass amounts of hair and canine-like tendencies who rides from village to village with a traveling carnival of actual freaks, led by none other than Tim Curry (who doesn't ham it up like he normally does and delivers an honest performance).

Naturally, the townsfolk of this new town are either idiotically amused or genuinely freaked out by the new arrivals, particularly the wolf girl, save for one loner kid (played by Dov Tiefenbach, the silly stoner kid from Jason X), who befriends her.

After she's bullied and attacked by a group of youths (led by Shawn Ashmore, Iceman from the X-men movies, who shares a freakish secret of his own that comes out of nowhere and sure as hell surprised me), her and Dov mess with his mom's (Lesley Ann Warren, who's a bit underused in this I must say) science experiments to help her shed all of the hair.

As the story goes on, we see an ironic twist of fate as the wolf girl tries to hard to shed her wolf image, the more human she appears, the more animalistic she becomes. The story winds up being genuinely heartbreaking, and the actors do a fine job of conveying these emotions.

This film totally surprised me, and I loved it. I only wish it wasn't poorly marketed with such a moronic title and terrible, unrelated poster art. Be on the lookout for Darlene Cates (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) in another emotional role as the fat woman of the circus, as well as Grace Jones (Vamp, Conan the Destroyer) who, clearly unable to age, plays a part-man, part-woman freak.

Little person, Jordan Prentice (also terrific in In Bruges), also has an early and well-acted role in this film as well. Overall, terrific movie. Very surprised by how well this turned out.