The Company of Wolves

For his second feature, Neil Jordan adapted Angela Carter's fantasy horror short story, which embeds a number of even shorter stories into its overall framework. The film attempts to put back much of the scary, Freudian subtext which, by the mid-'80s, had been stripped out of fairy tales. Nothing in the movie is quite as fantastic as the image on the poster, which depicts a Little Red Riding Hood character witnessing a wolf emerging out of the mouth of a shirtless young man. Still, there are quite a lot of wolves in this movie and some impressive wolf transformation scenes. The cast is impressive, too. Angela Lansbury, David Warner, Sarah Patterson, Kathryn Pogson, Stephen Rea, Jim Carter, and Terence Stamp mostly hold our attention. Unfortunately, the various embedded stories don't connect to the framing story in a very satisfying way.