YMMV / Brotherhood of the Wolf

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Audience members might find 18th-century Frenchmen "kung fu fighting" to be strange, but all the martial arts showcased in the film are actually accurate for the period and place. The kicking style used by roughly everybody in the film comes from savate, which was starting to take form by the time the film is set, while all the stick-fighting comes from another native style named canne de combat ("combat cane").
  • The aristocrats' racial theories might sound over-the-top, but that's what many cultured people of the Age of The Enlightenment actually postulated and believed about Native Americans and blacks. France being located next to Spain, in whose empire intermarrying between all sorts of ethnicities was commonplace, didn't even help; on the contrary, it caused the Spanish and Portuguese Empire to develop similar attitudes on the matter. However, the film also illustrates that those beliefs were limited to the intellectual elites, as the town's prostitutes, who are still aware of Native Americans being a thing (even if they get the tribe wrong), find no reason not to sleep with Mani other than his tattoos being believed to be sorcery.
  • The plan of using blankets infected with smallpox to weed out Native Americans actually happened in history, although it wasn't used by the French on the Iroquois, but by the English on the Pontiac coalition.
  • Interestingly, some modern investigations have theorized that the real-life Beast of Gevaudan might have been a non-autochthonous animal (maybe a hyena, or even a big cat as portrayed in the film) controlled by men with an unknown purpose. Brotherhood of the Wolf may therefore be more accurate than it looks. There are even those who believe the real beast's killer, a man named Jean Chastel, was also the one who trained the beast in the first place (again, as portrayed in the film, where he's the old man who takes care of the beast), which is how he was able to kill it with a legitimate silver bullet, since a real silver bullet is so inaccurate he'd have to have gotten real close to the animal to do the deed.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: One of the most memorable aspects of the film is the gorgeous Monica Bellucci and her nude scenes.
• Complete Monster:
  • Jean-François de Morangias appears to be a foppish, crippled aristocrat, but is in reality a deadly enforcer for an evil cult. After returning from Africa, Jean-François brought with him a lion that he controls and keeps in a state of constant agony, using it to slaughter people while the poor creature is in so much pain it can't control itself. Jean-François also reveals a rather perverse lust towards his sister Marianne and later rapes her.
  • Henri Sardis is a rogue priest who secretly leads the Brotherhood of the Wolf. Disgusted at the advances of The Enlightenment, Sardis has the Beast sent out to terrorize the countryside of Gévaudan. Dozens are killed in the resulting carnage, with Sardis planning to lead a revolution and overthrow the kingdom of France to establish his own theocracy.
• Cult Classic: The film has a lot of fans because of its unusual combination of gritty mystery, excellent fight choreography and quirky 18th-century Historical Fiction.
• Evil Is Cool: Jean-François is unusually stylish and cool, not least because of Vincent Cassel playing him.
• Magnificent Bastard: The alluring and deadly Sylvia is an agent of the Holy See sent to stop the mad priest Henri Sardis. Posing as a prostitute, she seduces the Chevalier Gregoire de Fronsac and gives him information to hunt down Sardis' organization before poisoning him to fake his death and allowing him to get close enough to wipe out Sardis' group, the Pact, while she brings her forces to eliminate any others swiftly.
• Older Than They Think: The idea of an American Native doing kung fu kicks (or savate kicks in this case) might sound new and quaint, but the 1969 film The Undefeated, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and starring John Wayne, already featured such a character shooting flying kicks and such in a rather tongue-in-cheek brawl scene.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Not the film itself since it came out first, but rather the video game Bloodborne, which borrows aesthetics and themes and gives them a twist.
• Too Cool to Live: Mani.

---