'Blood': Pallid, save for its heroine

Blood & Chocolate is one of those films you really want to like, but which leave you feeling empty.

A Romanian romance dressed up as horror, Blood does to the girls-with-a-werewolf fetish what Francis Ford Coppola's R.L. Stine adaptations did for boys hot to be in The Wild One.

Based on Annette Curtis Klause's young-adult novel, the film is about the verboten love between Aiden (Hugh Dancy), a free spirit traveling through Romania, and Vivian Gandillon (Agnes Bruckner), an heiress being groomed to marry Gabriel (Olivier Martinez), the leader of a secret Romanian cult.

Trouble is, the group is actually a pack of werewolves that can change into real wolves in the flash of an eye. (Sorry, no cool, grisly transformation scenes a la The Howling.)

Blood floats interesting ideas about history's iron grip on Europe's self-identity and America's faith in self-determination. In Romania, you have to wait for history to assign you a destiny; in America, you create one yourself. The film also raises the question of what function werewolf and vampire myths play in irreligious modern Western culture - after all, they developed as part of the overall religious discourse. Most literate horror fans already know this stuff too well.

But Blood is heavy-handed: In one silly, over-the-top bit, the lycans, who are decadent, moribund death dealers, own an absinthe distiller (the favorite poison of professional fin de sièclers Baudelaire, Wilde & Co.). Next to them, Aiden is the free spirit of a country with no history.

Too often Blood plays like an inferior copy of that other flick about an American boy in love with a hot European wolf-girl, An American Werewolf in Paris, itself a very inferior copy of John Landis' masterful An American Werewolf in London, but without any of the suspense, action or humor of its predecessors.

As for Blood's handling of feminine adolescent angst, you'd do much better to see the far superior cult favorite Ginger Snaps and its two sequels.

The film's one bright light is Agnes Bruckner and her self-assured performance as a smart heroine who, when the going gets bloody, broods and then thoughtfully acts - rather than scream and scamper away like a simpering girlie-girl. (Not too many heroines other than Alien's Lt. Ellen Ripley get to brood.)

Bruckner, the star of the ho-hum voodoo melodrama Venom and Lucky McKee's terrific The Woods, is one rising star of a horror chick to watch.

Movie Review

Blood & Chocolate

** (out of four stars)

At area theaters

Produced by Daniel Bobker et al.; directed by Kaja von Garnier; written by Ehren Kruger, Christopher Landon; distributed by MGM.

Running time: 1 hour, 38 mins.

Vivian Gandillon. . . Agnes Bruckner

Aiden. . . Hugh Dancy

Gabriel. . . Olivier Martinez

Parent's guide: PG-13 (violence, sexuality, drug use, lupine behavior)

Playing at: Area theaters

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