Directed by Thom Fitzgerald (The Hanging Gardens, Beefcake)

Written by Lori Lansen (Tessa, Marine Life)

Starring
Victoria Sanchez (Satan's School For Girls 2000 TV remake, Dorian)
Tim Curry (I'm a regular Frankie fan.)
Lesley Ann Warren (Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Clue, Cat Ballou)
Grace Jones (wait….what?)

Spartan Home Entertainment

New Line Home Entertainment

Review: by Don (e-mail your faithful reviewer)

Well... I said in the DarkWolf review that they don't make good werewolf movies anymore.  This one isn't bad.  Of course it's not a full-on werewolf movie, but that kind of works in its favor.

It's the story of young Tara Talbot.  She suffers from a rare disease known as hypertrichosis.  Excessive hair covering her body and all that.  She lives in a traveling sideshow attraction called Harley Dune's Wonders and Amazing Oddities.  Harley Dune, played by Tim Curry, is a pretty good guy who gives Tara and the others in the show a relatively good place to live and what have you.  Tara is, under all that hair, a very lovely girl. (Actually, due to years of watching Star Trek and other such shows, I kind of dug her with all the fur.  Sad, really).  But she longs to be normal. 

Now here's where it gets interesting.  We spend some time meeting the other freaks in the show.  And then we spend some time meeting the freaks that live in the town where the show has currently set up stakes.  You see, while we explore what it is to be a freak who wants to be normal, we also explore what exactly normal is.  All the supposedly normal people have their own issues to deal with.  Eating disorders, alternative lifestyles, x-treme dorkiness (a new entry into the X-games I hear), and one guy who daily must ask himself if size really does matter and hopes that the answer is in fact an emphatic "no."

So the really dorky kid actually kind of takes a shine to Tara the wolf-girl (he must have watched too much Star Trek, too), and since his mom works in a cosmetics lab where they are developing a new depilatory substance, he decides to help her be "normal."  Too bad the stuff is fairly untested and causes psychotic breaks.  You can see where it goes from here.  So, as we are shown that there really is no such thing as normal, the normal werewolf story is turned on it's head.  Our wolf-girl becomes more feral the LESS hair she has.  Strange, that.

This is not a great film, but I really liked it.  I got involved with the characters and with the story.  It doesn't play the way it was marketed so if you've seen trailers or what have you for this film, ignore them.  They're nothing like the movie.  It's really sort of sweet and sort of sad.  Not really a horror film at all.  More of a drama that happens to contain an animalistic mutilation or two.  There are characters you will love like Athena, the fat lady.  Or Grace Jones, who I haven't seen in I don't know how long, as the hermaphroditic, half-man half-woman Christophe Christine...  which is appropriate casting once I thought about it.  And there are characters you'll hate.  You'll know who they are right away. The bastards.  This movie was made for cable, and it isn't a great film.  But it actually manages to be pretty good.

Besides, it contains the sexiest male midget striptease I've ever seen.

DVD Details:

It's got a good widescreen transfer with great color, and the 5.1 sound was well mixed.

No special features aside from the trailer and cast and crew info.

As a note to fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Eliza Dushku's little brother Nate has a small role in this.  Neato.

Further Information:

Internet Movie Database