Wolfen (1981) – Review

1981 was certainly the Year of the Wolf, we got John Landis’s amazing An American Werewolf in London and Joe Dante’s equally excellent The Howling, but there was a third wolf film out that year, one that many people have forgotten, a little flick called Wolfen. What people didn’t know, and the studio did their best marketing spin to keep it that way, was that Wolfen was not a werewolf movie like the previous two, for at no point in this film do we see anybody’s body parts stretch or shift and grow an abundant amount of hair, and though this film is classified as a horror/crime/thriller the horror element is very, very small.

What this film is truly about is man’s hubris towards the environment, and how it will eventually bite him in the ass, and in this case quite literally. Long before Global Warming became a hot button topic many people cried out against man’s treatment of the natural world, and using film or television to promote environmental political agendas was certainly nothing new, and one of the best ways to sneak that stuff to the masses was to slip it into a genre movie. So in this outing we have a former NYPD Captain Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney), yanked out of retirement by his gruff boss (Dick O’Neill), investigating a particularly gruesome crime.  Christopher Van der Veer (Max M. Brown), a powerful real estate magnate and his lovely wife (Anne Marie Pohtamo) were horribly torn apart in Battery Park, while their chauffeur/bodyguard was also found dead, his hand severed yet still holding his unfired gun.

He’s either being stalked by a Wolfen or The Predator.

The Wolfen-Vision is one of my bigger problems with the film because for most of the film’s 114-minute running time we do not see our title creature, instead, we get Evil Dead-Cam tracking shots that go on for fucking ever. Now keeping your creature’s appearances limited can be very effective, just look at how well that worked for Spielberg’s Jaws, but in the case of Wolfen, we get way too many of these thermo-cam POV shots before even knowing what the creature is supposed to be. In Jaws even if you didn’t see the shark we all know what a shark is, and how terrifying they are, but what the hell is a Wolfen? This is not helped when we eventually see them and they look just like normal wolves.

“Here boy, do you want some Snausages?”

I’m not saying wolves aren’t scary because if I was alone in the woods with them – not being Liam Neeson – I’d be terrified as well, but the simple fact is that wolves are really beautiful animals and plucking them into an urban environment takes much of their power away. It’s not until the third act that we get the supernatural element of these creatures explained, but what we learn wasn’t worth the wait.

Note: Back when I first saw this film I assumed they were invisible as that is really the only way to explain them wandering around New York City completely unnoticed, but that turned out not to be the case as they apparently can “ghost out” and teleport.

During his investigation Captain Dewey Wilson, who gets partnered up with criminal psychologist Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora), first suspects that Native American militant member Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos) is somehow involved, and it’s while interviewing him up on the high steel of a suspension bridge that the first mention of shape-shifting occurs, totally getting our hopes up. Holt tells Dewey that he can turn into many types of animals, including wolves and eagles, and he even tells Dewey to go jump off the bridge and flap his arms, offering the tip, “It’s all in the head.” When Dewey tails Holt that night he finds him naked at the beach acting like a wolf but just when Dewey is going to shoot the apparently “Crazy Indian” – before he can pounce on him, Eddie suddenly stops and says, “Dewey, I told you, man, it’s all in your head.” Turns out Eddie Holt was totally fucking with him. This is one of my favourite moments in the movie, as it’s nice to see the “Wise Native American” having fun with the stupid white guy.

Also, you get to see young Commander Adama running around naked.

Unfortunately, this moment is harmed by two things; one being that Edward James Olmos is of Mexican descent, not a Native American, and secondly and more damningly, is that later the Wolfen are revealed to actually be magical Native American bullshit. I would have been much happier if the whole Native America thing had just been another red herring, like the terrorist angle that most of the bigwigs in the movie believed it to be, but instead, we get a scene where, after his friend Whittington (Gregory Hines) is killed, while trying to help hunt the wolves, Dewey staggers to a bar frequented by Native Americans and is told by Holt that the Wolfen are wolf-spirits that combined with some of the Native Americans during the genocide caused by White Man’s arrival in the New World and that they now live off the forgotten people of the world, with the occasional murder to protect their hunting grounds.

Gregory Hines should have known better than to be a black man in a horror film.

So we learn that Christopher Van der Veer was targeted because he was demolishing the slums that the Wolfen’s called home, and this, of course, relies on us buying wolves seeing a man in a suit using a silver shovel during a “Ground Breaking” photo op to be the guy they need to kill to save their home. The Wolfen even start targeted people who are investigating the deaths, case in point we have a poor hapless zoologist named Ferguson (Tom Noonan), who Dewey and Whittington consulted to see if he could identify animal hairs found at the scene of the crime, and he is slaughtered by the Wolfen, and this happens after we learn he loves wolves, and that he hated how they were hunted to near extinction, and doesn’t believe they could be the culprits.

So he was killed by the Wolfen because they hate sympathy?

Setting aside the title monsters not making any sense we now look to the film’s bigger problem, and that would be its pacing, as this movie trundles along like the slowest police procedural in the history of film, and when I heard that Michael Wadleigh’s cut of the movie, before his removal from the film in post-production, was over four and a half hours, my mind reeled in wonderment as to what the hell else he had shot. A year later Larry Cohen would release Q: The Winged Serpent, a film with very similar themes and was also about police investigating a series of brutal killings that turn out to be done by a creature of a mythological nature, but in that film he managed to tell that story in a brisk ninety-three minutes, not to mention the fact that the movie ended with heroes facing off against what was basically a dragon,and not a bunch of wolves that have been living off the homeless…

…and like pretending to be Michael Myers.

Michael Wadleigh’s only other screen credit is the 1970 Woodstock documentary, and one wonders why the hell he was hired to helm a monster movie, but it’s certainly clear why he never directed another movie after this one. The only thing this movie has going for it is the cast, as across the board every part in this movie is handled really well, even non-Native American Edward James Olmos is fine. Maybe if he’d stay closer to Whitley Strieber’s book, which had no mysticism at all, we may have got a better movie. In 1983 Tony Scott would tackle Whitley Strieber’s book The Hunger, and by staying truer to the source material he gave us a film that was a much better adaptation of Strieber’s work than Wolfen was.  I will say this though, Wolfen had a really nice tagline.

“They can hear a cloud pass overhead, the rhythm of your blood. They can track you by yesterday’s shadow. They can tear the scream from your throat. Wolfen. There is no defence.”