If you’ve ever shaved your legs, face, or armpits and thought, Wow, this is tedious, then spare a thought for poor Tara in Wolf Girl. She’s got hypertrichosis—the “werewolf syndrome” where your face basically tells Gillette to go bankrupt. Played with heartbreaking ferocity by Victoria Sanchez, Tara is the circus’s cash cow, the “Wolf Girl” attraction. She’s mocked, feared, fetishized, and exploited. But hey, at least she has Tim Curry running her freak show and Grace Jones hanging around to remind us that fabulousness can survive in any genre.
This is not just a horror movie. It’s a shaggy dog story with claws, fangs, and enough weird camp to make you laugh nervously before realizing, oh wait, that’s actually tragic. And maybe that’s why Wolf Girl deserves a second look. Beneath the fur, there’s meat. And it’s bloody good.
Step Right Up, Ladies and Gentlemen
We open in the grimy glamour of a traveling freak show, where everyone’s either deformed, pierced, or Tim Curry. Curry plays Harley Dune, the ringleader, who smarms his way through introductions like a man who’d sell you a cursed monkey paw and charge extra for the packaging. He isn’t cruel to Tara, exactly—he “loves” her the way a gambler loves his winning hand. Which is to say, until it loses money.
Around her is a family of fellow oddities: the Fat Lady (played by the unforgettable Darlene Cates), the Rubber Girls, the Human Torso, and so on. They form a community that’s warmer and more genuine than anything Tara will ever get from the outside world. In the circus, she’s family. In town, she’s the sideshow even when she isn’t on stage.
Enter Ryan: The Puberty Fairy With a Scalpel
Then Tara meets Ryan (Dov Tiefenbach), a sweet, awkward boy with a scientist mom (Lesley Ann Warren) who’s working on an experimental depilatory drug. He’s basically a walking advertisement for “Don’t take stuff from your mom’s lab.” Tara tries the drug, the hair vanishes, and for the first time in her life, she looks “normal.”
But here’s the catch: the miracle cure doesn’t just smooth her skin. It brings out something lurking beneath. With every dose, Tara sheds more of her human self, trading her awkward innocence for feral instincts. It’s like She’s All That if the prom queen started gnawing on the football team.
Beauty Is Pain. Sometimes It’s Murder.
Tara’s transformation is both intoxicating and horrifying. She’s suddenly desirable in the conventional sense, and people treat her differently. But this new confidence also comes with disturbing side effects—bloodlust, violent dreams, the occasional urge to snack on high school bullies.
Enter Beau (played by baby-faced Shawn Ashmore, pre-X-Men fame), the kind of small-town jock whose biggest secret isn’t his cruelty but his micropenis. When Tara discovers it, Beau tries to kill her to keep his reputation intact. In one of cinema’s great karmic reversals, Tara kills him instead. It’s self-defense, sure, but it’s also the beginning of her full descent.
From there, things escalate: tongues ripped out, circus acts gone wild, and a lynch mob forming faster than you can say “angry villagers with pitchforks.”
Tim Curry and Grace Jones: The Freak Show Power Couple We Didn’t Deserve
Let’s pause to appreciate the casting. Tim Curry as the opportunistic ringleader? Inspired. Grace Jones as Christoph/Christine, a performer who blurs gender and sanity? Iconic. Both of them radiate the kind of chaotic energy that makes you forget you’re watching a low-budget Canadian-Romanian horror flick and instead imagine some underground cabaret where anything could happen.
Curry chews scenery like it’s cotton candy, while Jones prowls the edges of every scene like she might decide to eat the cameraman. Their presence elevates the movie from “weird creature feature” to “fever dream you’ll tell your therapist about.”
The Horror of Hair and the Tragedy of Transformation
What makes Wolf Girl oddly brilliant is its central metaphor. It isn’t really about lycanthropy. It’s about body horror in the most relatable way possible: the desperate, destructive lengths people go to just to fit in. Tara’s hair isn’t monstrous—it’s just different. It only becomes monstrous when others project their revulsion onto her.
The depilatory drug offers the illusion of belonging, but at the cost of her humanity. She literally becomes a predator to achieve what society defines as “beautiful.” It’s the same story every beauty commercial whispers: if you’re willing to suffer, if you’re willing to risk everything, you too can be loved. Tara just takes it to its logical extreme.
Blood in the Water (And the Hot Tub)
The violence, when it comes, is both campy and shocking. Watching Tara rip out a bully’s tongue is grotesque, but after enduring scene after scene of casual cruelty, it almost feels cathartic. Horror thrives on that sweet spot where you want to cheer and gag at the same time. Wolf Girl nails it.
Even when Tara attacks Harley during the show, it’s framed less like villainy and more like long-overdue rebellion. After all, this is the man who’s paraded her around as “the Wolf Girl” for profit since childhood. If biting your boss were socially acceptable, half of us would be in jail already.
The Ending: A Fairy Tale Gone Feral
The climax is as messy and tragic as it should be. Tara, hunted by the townsfolk, finally begs Ryan to shoot her before she loses all control. He can’t do it. Instead, he shoots a wolf, presents its body to the mob, and pretends the curse is lifted. Tara, meanwhile, slinks naked into the woods, free of hair but consumed by animal instinct.
It’s bleak. It’s beautiful. It’s the only logical way the story could end. Tara escapes the cruelty of society, but only by becoming what they always accused her of being: a beast.
Why Wolf Girl Works (and Why You Shouldn’t Laugh at It Too Much)
Yes, it’s campy. Yes, it’s shot on a budget that probably wouldn’t cover one episode of Stranger Things. But Wolf Girlworks because it dares to mix pathos with pulp. It’s part gothic fairy tale, part freak-show melodrama, and part PSA about not experimenting with untested pharmaceuticals.
Victoria Sanchez gives a performance that’s raw, vulnerable, and terrifying all at once. Her Tara is both victim and monster, reminding us that sometimes those roles are forced on people whether they want them or not.
And let’s not ignore the delicious irony: a horror movie about a hairy girl features both Grace Jones and Tim Curry, two of the least conventional, most gloriously freakish icons in pop culture history. It’s as if the film is winking at us and saying, Maybe the freaks were the beautiful ones all along.
Final Thoughts: A Hair-Raising Success
Wolf Girl may not be perfect—it’s rough, it’s weird, it occasionally veers into unintentional comedy—but it has teeth. It’s a fable about beauty, cruelty, and the monsters we become when we try too hard to be normal.
So the next time you roll your eyes at a direct-to-TV horror flick, remember Tara: the girl who shaved away her humanity just to be loved, and found freedom only in the woods.
Because if there’s one lesson Wolf Girl teaches us, it’s this: beware of miracle cures, be kind to the hairy kid, and never underestimate Grace Jones in a circus.
