When collecting The Wolf of Snow Hollow at the library recently, I saw Wolfen sitting next to it on the shelf and thought, “Hey, why not?” Wolfen is a not-quite-werewolf movie that has been largely lost to time, as it was released the same year as more notable (and well-remembered) definitely-a-werewolf films An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. Although a bit slow, it is an interesting little oddball, and another contender for one of the better films made by a “one-and-done director.” Of course, that’s only technically true if you exclude his 1970 documentary release, Woodstock, which won Best Doc at the 1971 Oscars while also picking up a nomination for Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing. Still, this is his one and only directorial feature, from a screenplay that he co-wrote with David Eyre, who was fresh off of his work on Cattle Annie and Little Britches, making this his sophomore effort. Stranger still, it was based on a novel by Whitley Strieber, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen this book cover before:
And if you haven’t seen that, then you’ve probably at least seen the parody of it on The X-Files:
(This is my favorite episode, by the way.)
Strieber is no stranger to adaptations. Wolfen was his first novel, with his second, The Hunger, becoming the 1983 Tony Scott-helmed David Bowie vehicle of the same name, and his non-fiction book The Coming Global Superstorm is the basis for 2012’s Rolan Emmerich disaster film The Day After Tomorrow. This one seems to deviate pretty far from the source material, at least inasmuch as the titular “Wolfen” are handled, but we’ll get to that.
It’s New York in the early 80s, a place and time where blight and crime were apparent and plentiful. Following a ground-breaking event, an entrepreneur, his wife, and their bodyguard make a stop in Battery Park, where the two were married. Shortly, however, all are slain by an unseen force or being, one that’s animalistic in some ways but also capable of neatly severing the hand of the bodyguard before he can finish drawing his sidearm. The bizarre nature of the crime prompts Captain Warren (Dick O’Neill) to call in Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney), who’s been forced into semi-retirement due to personal issues and alcoholism, from which he seems to have recovered. Wilson ends up working closely with two others: Whittington (Gregory Hines), a coroner in the overworked morgue, and Dr. Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora), a criminal psychologist. At the top of the suspect list is a recently released felon Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), a (tribe not specified) Native American who was previously incarcerated based on his supposed involvement with a paramilitary terrorist organization. Of course, all the forensic evidence indicates that no knife or blade was used in the killings, and the only physical traces left behind all point to a wolf as the killer.
In his contemporary review, Roger Ebert was quick to say that Wolfen was not a werewolf movie, which plays out in a scene that bears remarkable similarities to American Werewolf and Howling – until it doesn’t. Olmos (young and shockingly fit)’s Eddie strips down at the beach and begins howling at the moon and making dog-like prints in the sand with his hands, with the audience prepared for him to morph into a wolf of some kind, and then … he doesn’t. Dewey approaches him at the beach, having followed him from a bar, and Olmos stops in the middle of what would be a transformation scene in any other film, to taunt Dewey for his superstitions. Having semi-defined what Wolfen is not, we can say that Wolfen is a lot of things; it may, in fact, be too many things. The deceased billionaire killed in the film’s opening was the owner of a security firm whose budget apparently dwarfs that of the NYPD, complete with a monitoring system that looks like NASA launch command. Their network of surveillance borders on the futuristic, and that sci-fi boundary is crossed when we get to witness several interrogation scenes that feature impossibly advanced lie detection equipment. Wolfen is also a murder mystery that evolves into the pursuit of a serial killer as more bodies (well, more body parts) start popping up all over the Bronx. It’s a parable about ecology and colonialism that draws a comparison between the European slaughter of indigenous animals and humans. And, perhaps the most detrimental blow to the film, it’s a movie that has that New Hollywood zhuzh that makes it more interesting in some places and unfortunately bloated in others.
Visually, this one is a stunner. A few years before it would be put to use in Predator, Wadleigh shoots a lot of footage from the point of view of the Wolfen using a technique that mimics thermographic filming. Many scenes are set in the penthouse of the first victim, which features a panoramic view of the city that can be enclosed by long, slender mirrored blinds which lend themselves to great multi-mirror shots and other less conventional uses. The dilapidated church in which the Wolfen are (probably) hiding stands alone amidst a pile of rubble of the surrounding buildings as starkly as if it were on a flat plain, and its burn-darkened exterior lends it a tremendous sense of ominousness. Large areas of urban terrain are composed of nothing but bricks and detritus that look like something out of The Third Man as Dewey seeks answers amidst the decay. The first scene in which Dewey and Holt meet is set atop Manhattan Bridge in a dizzying sequence that follows Dewey carefully treading along a narrow bit of scaffolding before the two of them face off at one of the bridge’s highest points, and it’s positively vertiginous. It’s cleverly and atmospherically photographed, but I can’t help but take some issue with the many instances in which the film goes on just a minute too long, and these add up to something that’s a little too stilted in places.
Once Dewey can no longer pretend that something clearly supernatural is at work, he confronts Holt at the bar and gets the whole “Wolfen” thing explained to him. I won’t spoil it for you, other than to say that it does apparently differ from the book (in which the Wolfen are a semi-sentient parallel anthropomorphic evolution to humans who descended from a common ancestor with wolves). I’ll also say that it’s a little more heady than one would expect, and one that resonates despite some early invocation of “magical Native American” stereotypes. In that scene, Holt talks about how men may have the technological advantage over the Wolfen, and the film plays with this visually by showing us that the same kind of thermal imaging presented as being from the predator’s point of view is also in use in the lie detection software, showing that science is closing the gap, further enclosing the metaphorical (and perhaps literal) hunting grounds.
Despite the occasional dragging and the very New Hollywood touch of forcing a romance plot between two formerly married people (Dewey and Neff, who have little chemistry), this one is solid, and worth checking out.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 