Pretty good, unique, doesn't quite go where you think it will.

Rating: 7/10 (18 December 2009)

I enjoyed it for the most part, the F/X and overall production are great, the imagination certainly well realized, it's a fine film.
There are a few debits: the jarring contrast between Franco's pseudo-Nazi goose-steppers and this gamut of fauns, fairies and monsters-it doesn't always work that well. You half-expect Captain Vidal there to run head-first into the Faun and meet his comeuppance. Instead, the girl dies at the end and is received into a paradise w/ her parents on the thrones, the communist guerillas have sacked the mill and everything's, well, hardly a bed of roses.
It's somewhat of a downer, esp where the mother dies and w/ the torture scenes...I donno. Give Del Toro *** for the production and the sheer oomph of getting it thru, and do see it for that.
NOT a kid's movie.