There is some precedent for this kind of thing. Britain's venerable Hammer Films horror factory teamed up with Hong Kong's martial-arts specialist Shaw Brothers Studios back in 1974, when they created The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, widely known as the world's first kung-fu vampire epic. It didn't set the world on fire (and Dracula in this one honestly resembled an insurance salesman), but it set the stage for a number of supernatural martial-arts epics that would be made in Hong Kong over the years.

Though the French excel at relationship drama, they have no knack for horror films—once you get past Eyes Without a Face, the pickings are slim. They're not well-known for kung fu, either. So they gussy up this one up with mostly gorgeous widescreen photography (more on that later), a passle of charismatic actors and a po-faced storyline having to do with a series of mysteriously brutal killings and pre-Revolutionary French politics. If the filmmakers could have fully embraced their film's status as a parody of the traditional French cinema of quality that it most closely resembles, they might have been onto something. Instead, they seem dead-set on selling their genre yarn as a lush old-school drama, right down to the 140-minute running time and heavy-handed social commentary, modernized only by some whimsical efforts at martial-arts combat and a saturation of CGI effects work.

OK, I'm sure it's possible to ignore the epic posturings and the often shoddy hand-to-hand combat and simply enjoy the picture as a clunky-but-rousing romp through the history books. Brotherhood's jumping-off point is an old French legend that apparently has roots in reality—an unsolved series of brutal killings in 1764 and 1765 that were credited to an unseen "beast" of unknown origin but thought to be an uncommonly ferocious wolf. Into this milieu step Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan), a libertine just returned from the wars in America, and his faithful Indian companion Mani (Mark Dacascos). No, really—Mani is an Iroquois warrior, a man of few words (and brief loincloth) who was rescued by Fronsac after a raid on his village killed all those close to him. His heart went out to the Indian, Fronsac explains, in part because the English had fought dirty, practicing a crude form of bioterrorism involving infected blankets.

Their presence here is roughly equivalent to Axel Foley's arrival in Beverly Hills. They take some names, kick some ass, and discover that the beast is fearsome indeed. In fact, having recovered iron teeth from one of the corpses, Fronsac fears that it's part animal and part metal. Spooky. Almost before you can say "Jaws," a self-assured game-hunter delivers the bullet-riddled corpse of a garden-variety Canis lupus and declares it to be the body of the beast. Fronsac, Mani, and the savvy audience all know better.

The storyline gets more esoteric as it rolls along, revealing indications of a conspiracy against reigning King Louis XV and etcetera. Fortunately, following some leaden "martial arts" work in the early reels, the battle scenes grow more furious as the film goes along, and especially after revenge becomes a consideration. When the beast itself is finally revealed on-screen, it's a Gallic marvel—a high-tech collaboration between Jim Henson's Creature Shop and Parisian effects house Duboi. The filmmakers milk its first appearance for all it’s worth. The beast doesn't just attack; it mauls.

The performances are generally winning even when the filmmaking style is blasé, and the lush photography showcases the film's various landscapes, from the French countryside to the bodies that inhabit it. One only-in-France visual gag has Monica Belluci's breasts morphing into snow-covered hilltops, and the gorgeous costumes in the film's whorehouse interlude are topped in their sexy audacity only by the brazenly naked women displayed between their folds. In fact, Belluci, as an expensive prostitute with something to hide, is one of the best things in the movie.

The photography is so uniformly silky and rich that I cringed when some of the darker scenes turned blotchy and artificial in appearance. I believe that's an artifact of the process by which the film was scanned digitally for color-tweaking and then printed back to celluloid, and it's a shame that such lovely work has been compromised. The process by which this occurs, dubbed "Duboicolor," was also used on Amélie, which is similarly otherwordly but doesn't have quite as highly-processed a look. What it allows is some headache inducing, Matrix-inspired film editing that digitally undercranks and overcranks certain shots so that action seems to slow down just as, say, a boot collides with a head. That's a dubious advantage, but it does give these scenes some juice that they might not have had in the camera—and the only reason it pains me is that the cinematography is so sharp in the first place. Some of the colors have also been digitally pushed to near-saturated levels, ensuring that this is a movie that will play to the very back rows of the balcony.

All in all, I’ve just written a review of a film that I would certainly hurry out to see, particularly if it were playing at as convenient a suburban multiplex as this one was found in. The upshot is that it's a disappointment. Connoisseurs of Eurohorror shouldn’t miss this on a big screen; nonetheless Brotherhood of the Wolf is neither as crafty as it thinks it is or as much fun as it should be.