Video Games are a strange omnipresent part of our lives. Years ago, if you wanted zero part of gaming and gaming culture it could be ignored. Now we carry phones that can play the most popular game in the world with ease. Gaming is everywhere but for some reason I cannot figure out why we have yet to make a great video game movie. It is kind of strange actually but taking a narrative where the player is in control of the action and translating that down to fixed experience is tough at best. I am quoting one of our other writers, Chris Lee, when I say that. At the end of the day gaming has made an impression on cinema and the other way around. When I write these it isn’t alway going to be a movie I never forgot about but culture at large did. Sometimes it is going to be about a movie I straight up forgot existed.
I bring up video games because the current director of the Metal Gear Solid adaptation Jordan Vogt-Roberts did an interview with Collider. In that interview he talked about films that took from the language of games and added it to cinema. His argument was that films like Snowpiercer and Edge of Tomorrow speak to that language. Something many have brought up but he had a take that brought back fond memories of today’s insane film. The Bloodborne movie we may never get with kung fu, Brotherhood of The Wolf.
Fair readers I expect you to know nothing about this film. It is a french language action film that takes place during the French Revolution with a martial arts skilled Iroquois man as one of the two leads but when I say this movie is wild I mean it is one of the most quietly insane films ever made. The film is about two men who go to a city to fight off a werewolf like creature but what you get it is a film that has insane production value, wildly inventive use of action and a film that really knows how to blend genres adeptly. These will eventually become staples of director Christophe Gans entire career but for this film you can see a director in a confident space working hard to create something wholly unique.
Gans would eventually go on to make the only good video game adaption in my humble opinion, Silent Hill. A film with all of the tone and wild choices that Brotherhood of The Wolf had with a lot of the bite taken out. Gans hasn’t made many films either which is wild because in some ways I think he his a wildly talented autor that never got a fair shake at making the kind of films in hollywood he should have. Gans has the gothic nightmare visions of Del-Toro and the love of B-Movie cinema that Tarantino is loved for with just a touch of Luc Besson’s wonderful french mania. I am selling this movie hard without giving you much details and there is a reason for that.
I am preaching about this movie because it will be completely forgotten if I don’t. This isn’t like Kiss of The Dragon where you can get it on blu-ray right now. Brotherhood of the Wolf never got a real USA re-release as we moved into a new generation of video player. DVDs are ebay fights and the only Blu-Ray I can find that works on modern players is a Korean copy which apparently works but you can still only get used. We forget so often with generations of films at our fingertips how many movies are lost to time. Brotherhood of the Wolf is a genre bending masterpiece that isn’t on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon or any of the many growing number of streaming services.
Brotherhood of The Wolf deserves your time and energy. It is the kind of movie that we need today. A kitchen sink film with focus. The kind of movie that is a testament to what a director with a strong vision and love for cinema can do. It is also one of those rare foreign films that had international aspirations based solely on its ability to fuse so many enjoyable genres together with a touch of european sex appeal. So let’s not allow this film to become lost to time. Let’s be better and save Brotherhood of The Wolf.
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