When it was first unleashed on the public, Blood And Chocolate was slated as "the Jack Russell of werewolf flicks". It centres on starlet Agnes Bruckner, playing a teenage werewolf who falls for a mere mortal (Hugh Dancy). Meanwhile Olivier Martinez wanders around as leader of the pack, looking moody and growling at people. Not surprisingly, paying punters gave it a wide berth in cinemas.

Blood, Chocolate And Cheese

A batch of fifteen deleted scenes are padded out with cutaways that barely amount to twenty seconds - just enough time for an actor to slope moodily from one shadowy place to the next. Katja Riemann also features heavily as Astrid, the aunt and mother figure to hormonal Vivian (Bruckner). They bicker over Vivian's romantic choices and she's later confronted by Gabriel (Martinez), who fills her with absinthe to extract the truth about where the young lovers are hiding. "They're in love. Don't you remember how desperately in love we once were?" Astrid whimpers. "Drink," growls Gabriel. What a guy.

Blood And Other Excretions

Martinez joins director Katja von Garnier for the commentary, but he doesn't add much except to point out that the motorcycle he rides in the film is his own. But then Garnier isn't exactly an oracle on filmmaking either. She dispenses a few simple facts about the shoot, pointing out locations in Romania, noting the difficulties of communicating with a foreign crew, and revealing where effects were employed (although frankly, it's not hard to spot the seams).

Garnier also reveals that, leading up to production, the actors enrolled in "Wolf Camp" to spend time with real wolves and get into "the wolf mindset." Martinez doesn't delve into it, but if you listen carefully, you might be able to hear him peeing against a table leg. Genre buffs needn't bother sniffing out this DVD.

EXTRA FEATURES

Blood And Chocolate DVD is released on Monday 25th June 2007.