Wolfen (1981, Dir. Michael Wadleigh)
Synopsis:
After a millionaire developer, his wife and bodyguard are found savagely murdered and dismembered in Battery Park, troubled Detective ‚Dewey‘ Wilson (Albert Finney) is brought back to active duty and paired with criminal psychologist Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora) in effort to solve the crime, which the authorities think might have terrorist connections. However, with the help of forensic pathologist, Whittington (Gregory Hines), Wilson and Neff soon begin to suspect that they‘ve stumbled onto something far more bizarre – a race of hyper intelligent, wolf- like beings that hide in the decaying slums of the city and who will kill to protect their secret.
I‘ve mentioned in previous posts about how little it can take to spark my interest in a film – an intriguing poster or cool trailer and, back in the days when I was obsessed with special make effects, a gory production still photo. Such was the case with Wolfen, which I first heard about when I came across a photo of a corpse minus its right hand and head, slumped against the side of a car. This shot, taken from a scene near the end of the film, is not actually shown in the final edit, which ultimately only shows a brief shot of the severed head on the ground and the other characters reactions, was enough to pique my interest as a teenager and when the film was made available on home video, thanks to the brilliant Terrorvision series featuring Warner Brothers, Orion and MGM films in the mid 1990s, often released in widescreen for the first time and sometimes featuring collectible postcards with stills from the film (how I wish I’d kept those!) I immediately bought a copy. Despite its lack of a show-stopping transformation sequence or even that many gory sfx moments (which is a large part of the reason the film struggled to compete at the box office with the two other Werewolf movies of 1981: American Werewolf In London and The Howling – both of which leant more heavily on eye popping and, for the time, ground-breaking special make up effects), I loved the film – precisely because it did things differently.
For starters, it’s not really a werewolf film at all. In fact, the film is slightly ambiguous as to what the Wolfen really are. When I first watched it I assumed that they were shapeshifters, perhaps even Eddie Holt and his friends, but the more times I’ve watched it the less sure of this I am – Eddie and the other Native Americans know about the Wolfen because they are part of their Native American tradition but what are the Wolfen really? My guess, backed up by what I‘ve read about Whitley Streiber‘s source novel, is that they are hyper intelligent beings who have chosen to take the form of wolves, hiding in the slums of the metropolis, scavenging what they can. Their motivation is slightly unclear as well, their killing of Van der Veer and his wife is clearly an act of retaliation because he’s trying to redevelop their territory, likewise Dewey and Neff might be perceived as a threat because they’ve stumbled upon their secret, but what is their reason for hunting down Ferguson, who seems the most sympathetic of all the characters towards them? Perhaps some of this might have been made clear in director Michael Wadleigh’s initial 4 hour cut or even his more streamlined 142 minute version – which was still unfinished, as he apparently intended to shoot additional footage. As it is we’ll never know because all we have is the 115 Minute version that now exists – the product of 4 different editors and uncredited „completion director“ John D. Hancock (surely a pseudonym?), who was brought in to supervise the post production after Wadleigh and his visual effects supervisor Robert Blalack were fired, which resulted in Wadleigh trying (and failing) to get his name removed from the credits, an experience that made him so bitter that he returned to making documentaries (his previous directorial credit was for the documentary film, Woodstock) and has never made another feature film. Other last minute additions were some of the bloodier visual sfx and James Horner’s score, replacing the one written by Craig Safan. Horner was at the very beginning of his career at the time and wouldn’t create his breakthrough score for Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan for another year, yet there’s an assuredness to his work here as well as textures and motifs that he would return to in his scores for Khan and Aliens that make this some of his best work, making it all the more surprising that it has yet to receive a deluxe cd re-issue (especially when Safian’s un-used score has). So many film music aficionados list both The Wrath Of Khan and Aliens amongst their favorite movie scores and yet few mention his work here – which both of those scores owe a heavy debt to.
A much more detailed look at the trials and tribulations involved in making the film can be found in this superb blog post on Framerated, what’s amazing is just how good the resulting film is, despite the studio interference. We‘ve looked at various films hampered during post production during the course of this blog, either by the studio or for other reasons, and in most of the cases whilst the films remain interesting, they are generally flawed in terms of pacing or narrative development. With Wolfen, whilst Wadleigh’s mythical longer cut might well have been superior, what survives is still an incredibly taught thriller, at times closer to a police procedural than a horror movie, with great dialogue and great performances.
The script by Wadleigh himself, in collaboration with David Eyre and an uncredited (and then little known) Eric Roth (The Insider) is way above the usual standard for this type of film. The dialogue is short and punchy, often laced with dry or gallows humor, but there’s also a level of detail – both forensic (like in the autopsy scene) and mythological (the intertwining of the histories of the American Indians and the Wolfen) which makes this a really intelligent genre movie.
One of a trio of thrillers Finney filmed back to back after several years heading up a production company and intended in his words „to feel really assured and comfortable in front of a camera“ again – his performance here is far from unassured and if you’ve only really seen him in larger than life roles in Murder On The Orient Express, Annie, Miller‘s Crossing and even his final performance in Skyfall, then you might be surprised at how subtle his work is here. For me it’s easily one of his best screen performances – up there with his work in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke, A Good Year (which I wrote about earlier this year) and the tv adaptation of Kingsley Amis’ The Green Man. His work here is restrained and relatively taciturn, working well alongside all his co-stars, particularly the superb Gregory Hines (who also gives one of his greatest screen performances here) and the always fabulous Dick O’Neil as Finney’s superior Captain Warren. Diane Venora (in her first screen role) is good as Neff – despite her character not being given much to do and I’d argue that Edward James Olmos’ performance as Eddie Holt is every bit as good as his one in Blade Runner and the Battlestar Galactica tv series. If nothing else, he deserves kudos for climbing around atop a New York bridge (seemingly) without a safety harness. Finney deserves points for going up there too (I doubt he had to do much acting to look authentically terrified) – none of it is done with any sort of greenscreen as far as I can tell – it really is the two main actors having a conversation at the top of one of New York’s massive bridges.
It’s a scene that benefits greatly from Wadleigh’s documentary background, as do the scenes in the mortuary, Finney’s arrival at the Van der Veer crime scene and the daytime scenes in the abandoned and decaying city blocks that the Wolfen call home. Credit must also go to cinematographer Gerry Fisher (whose work I’ve already mentioned in my post on Running On Empty some years back). Fisher started working on gritty British films in the 70s, such as The Offence and the first ever film written about on this blog, Juggernaut, so crafting images in a documentary style is second nature to him, but he’s equally capable of photographing slick night time action scenes both here and in films such as Highlander, that are reminiscent of Conrad Hall or Dean Cundey’s work.
I had yet to see Geoffrey Reggio‘s Koyannisquatsi when I first saw Wolfen, but later on, the sequence showing the demolition of The Pruitt-Igoe housing project reminded me of the sequences in Wolfen of the areas where the Wolfen live. In this sense, the film is a very accurate depiction of parts of U.S. cities at the time, where derelict urban areas were being cleared to make way for new development. Because of this, the film often feels like it has more in common with earlier police procedural films, such as The French Connection or Fort Apache, The Bronx (which was also actually released in the 1980s), rather than the type of thriller (or horror film) that one typically thinks of from that decade – its sense of social realism as well as its ecological subplot feeling out of place in an era that only a few years later would declare „greed is good“ – which adds another fascinating layer to a story that subverts genre expectations on several occasions and, in retrospect, this is why the film is still interesting today: few other monster movies allow their creatures such sympathy, allow them to escape at the end unharmed and ultimately show them as the victims – whilst you can make the argument that it doesn’t always manage to pull off this feat successfully, that it succeeds at all considering the problems involved in bringing it to the screen is nothing short of miraculous.
If you’ve never seen it (which is entirely possible-it’s never been shown on British tv to my knowledge, for example), then do your best to hunt down a copy somehow (the Dvd has long since been deleted, but second hand copies can be found and there’s also a Blu-Ray available- though this really deserves a deluxe dvd or Blu-ray Disc, complete with a comprehensive documentary about its making – that, at least might be on its way from the same production team working on the documentary about Michael Mann‘s The Keep (though as that has been in the works since 2015, I‘m not holding my breath for it or the Wolfen documentary to arrive anytime soon!) At any rate it deserves far better than its reputation as the outcast werewolf movie from 1981. As far as I’m concerned it’s the best of the lot.
