Month: September 2025

Adapted fairy tale brings together hermit, runaway teen

Ivan Martin plays the character known only as the “Woodsman” in writer/director Kelsey Taylor’s adaptation of a familiar fairy tale. (Photos courtesy of To Kill a Wolf)

By Richard Ades

Most of us are familiar with Little Red Riding Hood, the story of a girl who ventures into the woods and has a disastrous encounter with a hungry wolf. The fairy tale is generally considered a symbolic warning to girls about the dangers they face from human “wolves” (i.e., lechers) as they approach womanhood.   

With To Kill a Wolf, writer/director Kelsey Taylor takes the tale’s basic characters and injects them into a modern yarn with an entirely different message. While the original story cautions listeners to avoid danger, Taylor’s adaptation is about dealing with danger’s aftermath: the guilt, shame and other reactions that remain after a catastrophe that was at least partly one’s own fault.

Switching the order of the original tale, Taylor starts out by introducing us to the “Woodsman” (Ivan Martin), a grizzled middle-aged man who lives on his own in a remote, wooded area of Oregon. We first meet the hermit when he’s prowling among the trees with a metal detector searching for—what?

The answer comes when the detector alerts him to an object buried under leaves on the forest floor. It’s an animal trap, the kind that’s designed to clamp onto its unsuspecting prey’s leg and hold it until the creature either starves to death or is dispatched by the trap’s owner.

The man sets off the trap, rendering it harmless, and moves on.

It’s in the midst of such a search that the Woodsman discovers a teenage girl lying on the snowy ground, unconscious and near death. After taking her home and nursing her back to health, he asks how she ended up in that situation, to which he receives the evasive reply, “I don’t know.”

Dani (Maddison Brown) refuses to explain how she ended up alone in the woods.

We later learn that this Red Riding Hood stand-in is a 17-year-old runaway named Dani (Maddison Brown), but the girl stubbornly refuses to answer the Woodsman’s questions about her past. She’s obviously been through some kind of trauma, and whatever it was seems to have rendered her incapable of trusting another human being.

Almost as obvious is the fact that the Woodsman has been through a trauma of his own, as evidenced not only by his lonely lifestyle but by the artificial limb that’s hidden under his pants leg.

The two traumas, the girl’s and the man’s, form a mystery that’s only gradually explained with the help of an extended flashback and other devices. Keeping us invested along the way are two intriguing performances: Martin’s as the gruff but well-meaning Woodsman and Brown’s as the girl who keeps her emotions inside until it’s no longer possible.

Ably filling out the main cast are David Knell as a local rancher, and Kaitlin Doubleday and Michael Esper as Dani’s estranged aunt and uncle. Behind the scenes, the film benefits from the artistry of cinematographer Adam Lee and composers Sara Barone and Forest Christenson.

Directing her first feature-length film, Taylor has created a layered gem that’s at once a mystery, a character study and a meditation on the difficulty of healing from one’s own past. It’s an impressive debut, to say the least.

Rating: 4½ stars (out of 5)

To Kill a Wolf is available through VOD outlets beginning Sept. 23 and will screen virtually Sept. 25-30 through the Popcorn List’s Pop-up Series.

Pioneer left her mark on 1950s cheesecake photography

Model-turned-photographer Bunny Yeager poses with a tool of her trade. (Photos courtesy of Music Box Films)

By Richard Ades

Lots of women posed for Playboy when it first hit newsstands in the 1950s. Bunny Yeager was attractive enough to be one of them, but she instead opted to make her mark on the other side of the camera lens.

The story of this celebrated cheesecake photographer is told in Naked Ambition, a documentary directed by Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch.

Featuring vintage film footage and interviews with people who knew her, the flick depicts Yeager as someone who played a big role in shaking up America’s puritanical attitudes toward sex and nudity.

Yeager was introduced to the craft of taking naughty pictures by posing for a few herself when she worked as a model beginning in the ’40s. The experience proved to be helpful when she decided to switch roles, the doc tells us, as it allowed her make her own models feel more at ease.

As someone who’d spent time in front of the camera herself, Yeager knew the women were mainly concerned about looking their best. By demonstrating that she understood them and was on their side, she turned each photo session into a collaborative effort.

The result: images that were not only sexy but joyfully so, and which allowed the personality of each individual woman to come through.

Bunny Yeager helped to turn Bettie Page into a popular pinup model.

While helping her subjects achieve centerfold celebrity—and helping Hugh Hefner turn his cheeky magazine into a success—Yeager achieved a fair amount of fame herself. She even made an appearance on the TV game show What’s My Line, where the panelists were unable to guess that her “line” was “cheesecake photographer.”

Among her friends and admirers who appear in the documentary is the late talk show host Larry King, who shares a long anecdote that is amusing but has little to do with Yeager herself. Mostly, though, directors Scholl and Tabsch properly keep the focus on the woman who became known as “the world’s prettiest photographer.”

Sadly, Yeager’s life had its share of challenges and tragedies. Ironically, the doc points out, one of the biggest challenges was brought about by the changing attitudes she helped to foster.

As society became more and more open to sexually oriented images, the images themselves became increasingly hard-core. By the mid-1970s, especially after the launch of Hustler magazine, the emphasis was on (porno-)graphic nudity rather than the kind of subtle artistry that was Yeager’s stock in trade.

Suddenly out of work, the photographer was forced to reinvent herself—which she did, again and again.

Maria Stinger poses with a pair of cheetahs during one of Yeager’s typically elaborate photo shoots.

As a woman who found success in a field dominated by men, Yeager could be seen as a feminist icon. But since she found that success by taking sexy pictures of women for men’s enjoyment, she’s viewed by some feminists with mixed feelings. Indeed, we learn, her own daughters still disagree over the value of her legacy.

One thing that can’t be argued is that Yeager was a pioneer who left her mark on society. Naked Ambition remembers and honors her for that very reason.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Naked Ambition opens Sept. 12 in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Ottawa, Ontario, with additional openings scheduled in coming weeks. For a full list of engagements, visit musicboxfilms.com/film/naked-ambition/.