Blood & Chocolate (2007) / YMMV

Narm:
- The trailer can come off as this. It's desperately trying to present the story as a dramatic, action-packed supernatural romantic thriller, but any progress is scuppered at the end when the narrator announces in a super-serious voice that the title is Blood and Chocolate, of all things. It ends up sounding ridiculous, as it appears to have jack all to do with the movie being advertised (even to those familiar with the book, where the title does make sense, seeing as it ends up being an Orphaned Reference here).
- The sheer number of times Rafe refers to Vivian as his cousin. The first time it comes off as an understandable case of As You Know to establish their relationship to the audience, but Rafe constantly does it after that too, as if the audience will somehow forget they're cousins unless they're reminded every time they share screentime.
Older Than They Think: A lot of people have assumed the movie was riding on the coattails of Twilight, which made both Paranormal Romance and YA film adaptations highly popular. The movie adaptation of Blood and Chocolate actually came out the year before the first Twilight movie, and the book was originally published in 1997, nearly a decade before the first Twilight book was published.
Special Effects Failure: Just one of the feature film's problems. The werewolf transformations have the characters leap in the air and start to glow like Christmas trees before dropping down on the ground as normal wolves. The CGI in general looks cheap and unconvincing, which didn't help the overall quality.
Squick: Gabriel wanting Vivian as his mate is extremely creepy here. The age gap between them is even wider than it was in the book; a 24 year old and a 16 year old was already a bit iffy but now Vivian is 19 while Gabriel is about 40, so he's around two decades older. He's also in a position of authority over her and to make matters even creepier, he's technically her uncle and had a child with her aunt; he occasionally still has sex with her aunt even while courting Vivian.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A big reason why the film adaptation is disliked is because it made so many changes to the plot and characters, it barely has anything in common with the book, save for the title and that it includes a werewolf girl having a romance with a human boy. Some especially hated that it turns Gabriel into a one-dimensional Big Bad ^note and making some of the female characters (particularly Vivian and Astrid) much wimpier and more dependent on men than their book counterparts.
Trapped by Mountain Lions: There's mention made of some vague prophecy about someone who will lead the loup-garoux back into their glory days, which Vivian is believed to be the subject of. It not only isn't from the book, it has no impact on the plot at all; it is mentioned as being a reason Gabriel wants Vivian as his mate, but if you cut it out and simply had Gabriel lusting after her, it would make no difference.
Uncertain Audience:
- The film is ostensibly based upon the young adult werewolf novel by Annette Curtis Klause, but makes so many changes to the plot and characters it's barely recognizable. In the process it became a bland and generic supernatural love story that's been told a hundred times, stripping out the more unique and gritty elements from the novel. The end result is that fans of the book weren't interested because it had little in common with the story they loved, while other people weren't interested because it looked cheesy and cliched; it couldn't even appeal to horror fans because it clearly played up romantic drama over the horror elements. The film only grossed $6 million on a budget of $15 million.
- The attempt to associate it with Underworld - including rewriting the story to take more inspiration from those films and advertising it as being "from the producers of Underworld" - didn't quite work either; the Blood and Chocolate novel is a supernatural romance/Coming of Age drama geared towards a teenage audience with only a handful of fight scenes, while Underworld is an R-rated action movie (it does have romance in it, but it takes a backseat to vampires and werewolves kicking ass). The similarities between the two are few and at its core, Blood and Chocolate has more in common with The Twilight Saga than Underworld. Interestingly, an early idea for the Twilight film adaptation was to make it much more action-oriented, until Stephenie Meyer (who had more influence than Annette Curtis Klause) put her foot down and pushed for a more faithful adaptation. Considering that Blood and Chocolate's film adaptation was reviled by fans and barely made back half its budget, while Twilight became a smash hit the following year, the filmmakers of the latter seem to have made the right decision.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Aiden can come off as a creep when he first starts courting Vivian. Following a single brief meeting with Vivian, he happens to see her and begins following her through the streets demanding to know her name, even though she both ignored him and started legging it. And then he tracks her to her workplace, barges into the staff only area without permission and starts trying to chat her up even when she asks him to leave and tells him she has a boyfriend. Oh, and he sticks his finger in the pan of chocolate she's mixing, so she'd probably have to chuck it out and start again for hygiene reasons. He's presumably intended to be a Dogged Nice Guy who just can't get Vivian out of his head, but he comes off more as a stalker who just won't take a hint that the girl wants to be left alone (especially considering Vivian says it's been about two weeks since they last saw each other).

YMMV / Blood & Chocolate (2007)

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