Wolfen
(Warner Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(1981)
review by Suicide Blonde

Remember Spaghetti-Os? When you were a kid you just loved them, and weren’t they the tastiest damn thing? You could eat them every week!

And then you got older and tried Spaghetti-Os again and realized they weren’t all that great. Kind of lousy, in fact.

Watching Wolfen is a bit like that. I first saw it on cable when I was 12 or so and thought it pretty neat. But rewatching it a number (ain’t saying how many) of years later shows it to be a movie with a few good ideas that’s sabotaged by a sluggish pace and too-great a sense of its own importance.

Based on a novel by Whitley “I got anal probed by aliens” Strieber, Wolfen opens in a derelict section of the South Bronx that makes Beirut look like a great place to raise your kids up, where the billionaire head of a big corporation is taking part in a ground-breaking ceremony for an urban renewal project. The billionaire grins for the cameras and the press, and all the while some other eyes with cool heat-vision effects are watching him too.

That night the billionaire, his coke-sniffing wife, and their bodyguard stop to lollygag around Battery Park when they’re slaughtered by an unseen attacker. The next morning the police chief calls in retired detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) to investigate. Suspecting terrorism, Dewey first teams up with terrorism expert Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora); but the case soon takes a different turn when coroner’s assistant Whittington (Gregory Hines) figures out that the wounds don’t look like they were caused by anything human.

Wolfen’s director, Michael Wadleigh (best known for directing Woodstock), said he wanted to create a thinking-person’s horror film, and that should tell you all you need to know. Like John Frankenheimer with Prophecy, Wadleigh doesn’t know how to make a horror film actually scary. He’s too busy making points about society and “who is the real savage” and all that. When he tries to make things scary, it doesn’t always work. The point-of-view shots that are arguably Wolfen’s best-remembered feature, are not only wearying after a while, but they drain all the suspense out of things. When you see a lone wino standing in an empty lot, and the killer-cam starts racing toward the wino, it’s not hard to figure out what’s going to happen, but much harder to care, or even be interested.

Because the audience has a pretty good clue from the beginning what’s going on, the terrorism subplot only serves to drag things out unnecessarily. Also contributing to the film’s sluggish pace is the acting. Albert Finney spends the film looking rumpled, cranky, and sleepy, like Winnie-the-Pooh roused from hibernation. He’s also a complete cipher – we learn nothing about why he retired, nor why he’s the right man for the job. Diane Venora has nothing to do except provide a dubious love interest for Finney. Gregory Hines has fun as the Afro’d coroner but his performance seems to be coming from another, more enjoyable movie. Edward James Olmos livens up the screen, though, as a Native American who’s initially a suspect in the case. Future Francis Dolarhyde Tom Noonan shows up briefly as a nerdy zoologist but doesn’t do much.

Wolfen isn’t a complete loss. Its central idea is interesting. The wolves wait too long to make their appearance, but they are beautiful animals. The New York locations are good, though I hope the South Bronx has gotten fixed up a bit since. There’s some effective gore, including one of cinema’s better decapitation scenes, though the scenes are so quick that if you glance at your popcorn bucket you might miss them.

Don’t get excited by that nudity rating. It’s nude corpses in a morgue, Hines’ ass (don’t ask), and an full-frontal-with-strategic-shadowing scene by Olmos I could have lived a happy life without seeing.

The extras are nothing special – a trailer and a text-only documentary about werewolves in movies. The DVD box says there’s a commentary – there isn’t.