Trailer Stash The new trailer for Blood and Chocolate deconstructed. By Sara Brady Icon by Lisa Martin

This week I've been pondering a topic that has consumed movie audiences since Boris Karloff threw that little girl in the river when he ran out of flowers: Why are monsters sexy?

I've been inspired by Johnny Depp, a rash of recent romance novels, that whole half-season of Buffy I watched when Angel lost his soul, and lately, the trailer for MGM's Blood and Chocolate, in which Agnes Bruckner plays a young lady werewolf and the deliciously adorable Hugh Dancy plays the curly-haired lad who falls in love with her. Just like my own tortured adolescence.

When you think about it, monsters (and I'm including vampires as well as your usual complement of werewolves and lab-created folks in that term, although I draw the line at mummies and zombies) shouldn't be as appealing as they've been onscreen in recent years. Although the vampires in Buffy were, well, undead murderers, they were all very, very sexy.

Click here to watch the trailer of Blood and Chocolate.

Which brings us to the werewolves in Blood and Chocolate. The trailer opens with a camera panning up over a church and shows Vivian (that would be Bruckner) inside, meditating. Pretty, pretty Hugh is also in the church, sketching or fixing his hair or something. His drawings skitter across the floor (they are of various beasties) as Vivian enters, saying, "This is a sacred place."

"Were you hiding," he asks her, as she turns away. I guess answering with "Yes, thinking about how you'd taste with ketchup" isn't how you want to start out. Then you hear a familiar roar, seeing how it's an MGM movie, but the roar is pretty apt for a film that's about, you know, devouring things.

The European club music starts as we pan over, uh, Paris? Prague? I'm not sure. Titles tell us that Vivian "was chosen" to wear the darkest eyeliner in the land... or to be "the queen of the night," as one of her compatriots toasts while she seems to look on in boredom. He looks a little like a sassy young Oscar Wilde, and this movie could only be more awesome if there were gay werewolves too.

Apparently Vivian was chosen to fulfill a prophecy, the titles tell us, as she spots Hugh, all scruffy and edible-looking, and the pair hit it off, it seems, strolling, as she brings up the obstacle to their hot, forbidden lurve: "My family has plans for me." And then they get soaked by a fountain and any rational woman, werewolf or not, has to admit that Hugh does wet very well. I'm feeling a bit carnivorous myself.

Then Olivier Martinez shows up as the hot male werewolf representative. "Every seven years," he exposits, "the leader of the pack takes a new wife." Vivian grits, "Don't you mean 'mate'?" Oh, snap. Wait, that... is the same meaning even if you aren't talking about animals. Come on, step it up, screenwriters Ehren Kruger and Christopher Landon.

It seems Vivian has a "secret within," which we've all figured out even before a wolf growls and she brings Hugh into some sort of catacomb with wolves on the tombs. "I heard there were places were wolves were almost... worshiped," he says, and she replies nonsensically, "You mean werewolves." They were? Okay, sure.

And then they make out. As Hugh is doing his thing to Vivian's neck, her eyes turn yellow. Can making out give you hepatitis? Oh, no, it just releases "the beast inside." Maybe now is a good time to mention that this movie is loosely based on a young adult novel of the same name by Annette Curtis Klause, so the parallels to puberty (or to violent, personality-altering lust) are not accidental. Vivian breaks away from Hugh and we see Olivier gathering his pack together, saying, "We gather tonight as one, for we are one. And we hunt as one."

Oscar Wilde, from earlier, shows up to intimidate Hugh, in the battle royale of the girliest boys who ever bought hair pomade. They slap-fight and Oscar's eyes turn yellow, which understandably freaks Hugh out a little. So he asks Vivian, "Why do you know so much about wolves?" I guess the movie isn't using the reliable old grad-student-in-lupus-ology cover for her? "I wanted to protect you," she says, dripping wet again. Don't werewolves know about umbrellas?

Vivian makes out with Hugh some more, and I'm having a very hard time feeling sorry for the sassy little lycan-chick right now. "If they find you, they'll kill you," she Juliets, and Hugh replies, "So how are we going to get out of the city?" Vivian wheels on him, all, "We? I just met you and haven't even tried to chew on your arm yet, you over-possessive freak?"

No, not really. She likes the we. Vivian fights and all her cousins turn into actual wolves in gleaming flashes of light. Frankly, I expect more from my morphing F/X, so I yawn and add Brotherhood of the Wolf to my Netflix. Everyone fights some more and Vivian pulls what looks like a rifle (a crossbow would have been cooler...) on someone. A cousin? Olivier? I don't know. Oh, and then she makes out with Hugh some more and a building blows up from the sheer force of their hotness.

January is usually a wasteland of terrible movies starring Paul Walker, so I'm totally in for anything involving a dripping wet Hugh Dancy. I have just one question, though: Where is the damn chocolate?