It’s really tough to make sense of “The Marsupials,” but much like the second film, it has a good idea but a terrible execution. It wants to be a psychological thriller, a horror romance, a satire of horror movies, and a werewolf picture all in one and fails to deliver on these aspects two fold. “The Marsupials” garners too much of a narrative for one picture, and should have been spread out in to another film, altogether. One thing is for certain: The connection to the Joe Dante film stops at the fact that it has werewolves in it.
Now that her small community has began hunting marsupial-like werewolves with the ability to breed and cradle their young in pouches, the gorgeous Jerboa runs from her town and retreats to Russia. While trying to forage for food, she’s discovered by a young assistant director named Donny who casts her to star in the film he’s helping to make. The film is in fact a werewolf movie, one that “Gets it all wrong,” according to Jerboa, who laughs when an actor is donning werewolf prosthetics. The film itself is goofy and idiotic, while the director seems to try his best at mimicking Alfred Hitchcock. Meanwhile, as she avoids hunters. the pair begin falling in love, Jerboa is impregnated, and soon there’s one big bowl of werewolf stew.
Concurrently, a doctor has caught two werewolves hiding out as aristocrats, and begins testing them to learn about the new breed of Marsupial werewolves, and why they’re retreating to urban areas. To make things worse, Jerboa begins experiencing visions and is having trouble hiding her lycanthropic form in the face of filmmaking, and odd visual stimuli that begins triggering her metamorphoses. Phillipe Mora is behind the camera once again, never quite sure if he’s mocking werewolf movies or trying to create some Cronenbergian dissection of the sub-genre. The tonal inconsistencies are jarring, as sometimes it asks you to laugh at the horror, while other times you’re expected to delve in to the material with deep interest. I mean, are we supposed to laugh or cringe at the sight of nuns draped in the cloth with werewolf visages?
Is star Dagmar Bláhová playing the role of werewolf Ballerina for pure over the top camp, or is she convinced she’s pulling off a dramatic feat? “The Marsupials” mainly falters because it’s not only boring, but just isn’t horror. Not at all. For a movie about werewolves, I wouldn’t mind seeing some werewolf maulings. I’m not too keen on figuring out why werewolves are embedded in the minds of lycanthropes, nor do I want them to only be visions or delusions. “The Marsupials” isn’t so much a horror film, as it mainly strives to preach about how we should accept each other’s differences, and learn not to be violent to one another, whether man, woman, or furry supernatural man eating beast. It’s no wonder the rest of the series ignored this entry.