Deutsch Werewolves . . . Wolfgangs?

The pitch: Wolf meets Ole Bornedal's (original) Nightwatch (aka Nattevagten to purists).

The result: a stylish, straightforward, no b.s. bonafide "horror" film that delivers honest chills and laughs while never really exploring any new terrain.

Ignoring vampires for a moment, are there any other mythic creatures that've repeatedly gripped the imaginations of novelists, filmmakers, and moviegoers like werewolves? Just ask Paul Naschy, who built a career on them! Werewolves became indelible, state-of-the-art fear icons in the early 80s, thanks to clever, affectionate FX innovations like Joe Dante's The Howling and John Landis' An American Werewolf in London. In the 90's, forgettable films like Eric Red's Bad Moon, Anthony Hickox's Full Eclipse, and Anthony Waller's An American Werewolf In Paris somehow lost the lycanthrope legend's timeless metaphor of the doomed, tragic, infected figure who fights to maintain his humanity. You can't computer-generate heart and soul.

Night Time's story is simple but engrossing: Thomas Krömer's neighborhood is the site of recurring ritualistic murders, occurring mysteriously during a full moon. Animal hair found on the bodies points to two possible perpetrators: wolves or werewolves. But rumpled Thomas has other worries: he has films to translate (including Finnish werewolf films, if such a thing can actually be!) and desperately wants to win the heart of dishy Alexandra (Sherilyn Fenn lookalike Marie Bäumer).

One night, under a full moon of course, Thomas swerves off the road to avoid a collision, only to be attacked by an unseen (but hairy!) force. The creature's bite soon transforms his world into a surrealistic shamble of reality. Is he becoming a werewolf? Blood-drenched dreams suggest the folky belief that werewolves don't remember what they did the night before. As Thomas struggles to piece together the puzzle of his blood-drenched dreams, his nightmares become horrifyingly real. But watch out, Thomas and Marie, for that know-it-all folklorist!

Much like Mike Nichols achieved in the first two acts of his film Wolf, Night Time director Fratzscher plays with our fear of the primal beast within, reinforced by both oral tradition and the senseless violence found in our own modern lives. A character asks: are today's serial killers a truly modern phenomena? Or are they manifestations of the original, brutal fairy tales? Perhaps an age-old supernatural evil still exists that commands the innocent to kill their loved ones.

The small cast is appealing, and the film's overall photography and direction reminded me a lot, favorably, of Bernard Rose circa Paperhouse and Candyman. There are shocks and chills aplenty, refreshingly free of cheeky, post-modern irony. But given the usual sorry state of foreign genre film distribution in North America, I'm sure most Canadian and American fans will have to make due with a bootleg PAL transfer from the UK or Germany at some point.

- Maxx Renn