The Company of Wolves (1984)
Directed by Neil Jordan
An adaptation of Angela Carter's fairy tales. Young Rosaleen dreams of a village in the dark woods, where Granny tells her cautionary tales in which innocent maidens are tempted by wolves who are hairy on the inside. As Rosaleen grows into womanhood, will the wolves come for her too?
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What critics compared The Company of Wolves to
If she had been smart enough and sly enough she could have created an adult fairy tale along the lines of Neil Jordan's "The Company of Wolves."
(For the quintessential film treatment of the story, see Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves, which is based on the short story by Angela Carter.)
Seyfried and Fernandez enjoy a few stolen kisses and a chaste roll in the hay, but the film never tries to plumb its source's psychosexual depths in the manner of, say, Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" (filmed by Neil Jordan in 1984).
The second horror movie inspired by the Little Red Riding Hood tale (the first was 1984's "The Company of Wolves," directed by Neil Jordan), the new movie takes place in a deliberately artificial, almost Rankin/Bass-looking medieval village called Daggerhorn -- a doubly phallocentric name that ought to sound a warning to any young maiden.
The film you’re looking for is probably 1984’s certifiably crazy “The Company of Wolves,’’ with its Freudian psychology, icky transformation scenes, and Angela Lansbury as a malevolent granny warning Little Red to “never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.’’
Like many a classic fairytale, the Red Riding Hood story has been much revised and revisited over the years, perhaps most notably by the late British author Angela Carter, whose 1979 short story collection The Bloody Chamber (the basis for Neil Jordan’s 1984 The Company of Wolves) offered three distinctive variations, including one in which little Red cuddled up with the Big Bad Wolf himself—and in Granny’s bed no less!
Garland’s trademark opacity as writer-director is at its peak in Men , but the back half certainly delivers on visceral body horror – one sequence simultaneously evokes both Takashi Miike’s Gozu and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves .
THE GREEN KNIGHT may put fantasy film buffs in mind of John Boorman’s EXCALIBUR or even Neil Jordan’s THE COMPANY OF WOLVES.
One arcane mission after another shifts the tale not only away from the already phantasmagoric qualities of medieval pictures like “Ladyhawke” or “Legend” (or the mythical interpretations of something like “The Company of Wolves”) but also into the sci-fi realms of “Zardoz” or “Annihilation.”
Its closest relative is Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, though del Toro avoids the confounding pretension of that earlier work in favor of his own mordant witticism.
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The movie is directed by Charles Martin Smith, who knows from dog tales having starred in the lovely “The Company of Wolves” back in the day.
Less Prêt-à-Porter with teeth than The Company of Wolves from hell and in heels, it offers a bloody chamber of symbolic provocations (lunar cycles, occultist trappings) cooked up by a film-maker taking weekly tarot readings from the Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky and driven by an intoxication with the superficiality of the photographic image.
…it’s unconvincing. It evokes previous Frankenstein movies yet lacks the drive and sense of narrativity that distinguished Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, still the significant cinematic updating of the literary fantasy.
(Between Full Metal Jacket, the 1984 Freudian werewolf tale The Company of Wolves and his Oscar-winning work on 1989's Batman, Furst had established himself as an exceptional set designer before committing suicide in 1991.)
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And with the production designs of Anton Furst ("The Company of Wolves," "Full Metal Jacket") and Danny Elfman's darkly enveloping score, he has a shiveringly dense and poetic city against which to set his characters.