This French film became a box-office sensation to rival Titanic in its home country, succeeding largely by gene-splicing several different commercially robust Hollywood genres (chiefly the costume drama, horror film, and martial arts thriller) and pumping them up with a typically American sense of cinematic scale, if not emotional depth. Composer Joseph Lo Duca cut his teeth in commercials before beginning a successful collaboration with Sam Raimi in both films (the Evil Dead series, Army of Darkness) and TV (most notably Xena and Hercules), and his percussive, largely synthesized score for Wolf will be instantly familiar to longtime Raimi fans. With Spanish guitar arpeggios set against howling electronic effects, hoodoo-rhythmed electronic drums, horror-film jolts, and galloping action cues, Lo Duca raids his genre-rich résumé and imparts this ostensibly trans-ethnic score with an energy that"s distinctly Hollywood inspired. --Jerry McCulley