Wolfgirl

Review:

USA Captures 'Wolf Girl' Tue, Oct 16, 2001 05:17 PM PDT by Kate O'Hare

Filming "Wolf Girl" was a dark journey....

in many ways for the film's varied cast, which includes such disparate talent as Lesley Ann Warren, Tim Curry and Grace Jones. Airing Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2001, at 9 p.m. ET, on USA Network,

the film by director Thom Fitzgerald (writer/director on 1999's "Beefcake" and 1997's "The Hanging Garden" ) and writer Lori Lansens

focuses on a traveling sideshow exhibiting human oddities, run by the

enigmatic Harley Dune (Curry).

The star attraction is the Wolf Girl, 17-year-old Tara Talbot (Victoria Sanchez) -- who, by the way, shares her last name with Lawrence Talbot, the character played by Lon Chaney Jr. in the 1941 thriller "The Wolf Man." Tara suffers from hypertrichosis, a rare skin disease that causes the growth of long, soft hair all over her body. For her performances, she dons fake claws and teeth and rattles the bars of an on-stage cage. Offstage, she is a normal girl, but beyond Harley -- who adopted her as a baby -- her only friends are her fellow performers, including a 600-pound woman (Darlene Cates) and a hermaphrodite (Jones). Arriving in a small town, Tara becomes the object of ridicule and torment by local teens, led by a handsome boy (Shawn Ashmore), who has a dark secret of his own. With his friends (Shelby Fenner, Tony Denman and Nate Dushku), he also makes life difficult for a shy, bookish boy named Ryan (Dov Tiefenbach), the son of a scientist (Warren). Ryan's interest in Tara is both romantic and scientific, as he believes his mother's cosmetic research may offer a cure for her condition. The concoction he injects her with has an effect, but not the one either had anticipated, causing her to slowly become more animal than human.

"Wolf Girl" was shot in and around Bucharest.
"Romania is extraordinary," says Curry. "We were based in Bucharest, which used to be called the Little Paris, because it was such a beautiful town. "Unfortunately, says Curry, much of the city was demolished to make way for a palace and boulevard created by former President Nicolae Ceausescu, who was overthrown and executed in 1989. "It's a city that has just been brutalized by this man," says Curry. "Unfortunately, it's the one former communist country that hasn't really made a strong recovery, so it's a sad place to be, I have to say."

But, thanks to a thriving trade in videotapes and DVDs, Curry was a familiar face to both the Romanian film crews, whom he pronounces excellent, and to people on the streets.

"And," says Curry, "the," as he puts it, "left of center" cast of sideshow performers was augmented with local talent. Buster the Crab Man was played by Visinel, "whom we literally found on the street," says Curry. "At least three of the guys in the movie, we found dodging traffic and begging. The boy (Nelu Ion) who's the Human Torso, wheeled himself up to me on a roller-skate the night that I arrived, begging for money, and the next day I saw him on the set."

A flashback segment shows how Harley came to find Tara as an abandoned child. "When I discovered the Wolf Girl as a tiny baby," he says, "the beautiful baby [we used] was from a Romanian orphanage. He never made a sound. We were told that the babies in the Romanian orphanages learn not to cry very swiftly, because nobody's going to take too much notice. There are just too many of them." "I don't know that this little boy even had a name yet. He was one of the most beautiful little babies I'd ever seen, blond, blue-eyed, just a seraphic child. He was from an orphanage in Bucharest, of which I think, there are several."

Asked about the relationship between Harley and Tara, Curry says, "I could never really decide whether it was paternal or avuncular. One of the interesting things about the script was that, on the one hand, he was extremely compassionate in taking care of these people and giving them the opportunity to make a living and protecting them against the horrors of the real world, which doesn't take to freaks kindly." "At the same time, you can see, it's quite clear that once Tara starts to undergo this metabolic change, that he's very thrilled with the box office.

But he's a misfit, too. He's obviously a very sad person. He's imploded in some way. I was quite glad that we didn't have any history of him, that he's just this sort of slightly drunk enigma."

While Curry has traveled the world in his stage and film career, the filming of "Wolf Girl" was quite an experience for his younger co-stars. "At least two of them had never been out of the States," he says, "so formerly communist Europe was quite an eye-opener." "Not only were they immersed in barely recovering Romania, but also immersed every day in dank woods outside Bucharest. It was quite bewildering for them. We worked a six-day week, so there wasn't much time for field trips, but we did go one Sunday to Transylvania, which is astonishingly beautiful. We went to what they promote as Dracula's castle, where they sell blood-colored vodka in bottles."

Now that Halloween is approaching, Curry's star turn as the cross-dressing Dr. Frank N. Furter in 1975's "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" will be splashed across TV and movie screens.

"And I'll be in New York [at Halloween], oh, god," says Curry. "That's one of the great things about 'Rocky Horror,' every year somebody else is old enough to go and see it, so I get a constant turnover."

An accomplished stage performer as well as film actor (he gets to sing in "Wolf Girl"), Curry is returning to Gotham in October to begin rehearsals for a musical version of "A Christmas Carol," running Nov. 23 to Dec. 29 at the Theatre at Madison Square Garden.

CYBERSPATIAL ANOMALIES: To learn about the life and career of Tim Curry, try The Complete Tim Curry(http://geocities.datacellar.net/Hollywood/Cinema/2636/index.html).

HOW NICE OF HER!!!!

For more about Lon Chaney's classic film, try The Wolf Man -- Lon Chaney Jr. (http://www.lonchaney.com/wolfman.html).

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Last revised on 12-29-2001 by Linda Fletcher