A bold fantasy horror tale from director Neil Jordan that crosses Legend of the Werewolf with Little Red Riding Hood. That it fails by the highest standards of its kind is perhaps due to an inconsistent pace that is sometimes as torpid as the bizarre, almost medieval background music, and because not all the acting matches that of Angela Lansbury's Granny in quality, as she fills the heroine's head with grim stories of wolves and is doomed, as in the fairy tale, to come to a sticky end. The special effects are gruesomely vivid, and the film is uncommonly successful at creating a fairytale horror environment inhabited by wolves, snakes, polecats, owls, and toads, hopping, prowling and slithering round the crooked houses of the forest. An early sequence, with the heroine's sister being pursued by wolves through a nightmare toyland, is the most fully realised in the film, although the settings throughout are vividly, if gloomily imaginative in the Caligari style.

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