Wolfen - 1981
January 7, 2008 - 11:04 pm - Posted by Administrator
I saw Wolfen for the first time on HBO, when I was a pimply pre-teen. That was back in the day when HBO from the cable company cost an extra ten dollars per month, and all you got was HBO… one more channel. Plus, you had to get up and walk to the TV and flip the little black switch on your gold and faux-woodgrain HBO box to descramble the signal.
I was home alone (my parents must have been out drinkin’ at Fridays or the Torchlight), perusing the paper HBO-guide that they mailed to subscribers every month. I saw a movie called “Wolfen” and flipped it on. What I saw that night was a movie which to this day is begging for a remake. It’s also the source of a good obscure sci-fi factoid you can use to brain-bust even your nerdiest friends. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Wolfen is set in late-seventies New York, at the beginning of the redevelopment which would eventually transform the Big Apple into a cleaner, safer, and better smelling metropolis. It’s a movie about two cops, played by Albert Finney and Gregory Hines. They’re investigating several gruesome deaths–apparent animal attacks. Their investigation leads them to the city’s darkest neighborhoods–neighborhoods where ninety-nine percent of the residents have fled.
****Spoiler Alert****
Someone, or something is stalking the citizens of New York. We are treated to point-of-view tracking shots that show us the dark New York skyline, somehow enhanced by the predator’s vision, and populated by unsuspecting victims who stroll along unaware they’re about to become food. If I had to describe the effect, I would call it a more subtle version of the effect from Predator, when you see through the hunter’s eyes.
As the bodiess stack up, the investigators encounter a tribe of Native Americans which includes Eddie Holt, played by a very young Edward James Olmos. They are a superhuman species, capable of shifting shape at will. And they are killing to protect their hunting ground. By the way, if seeing full-frontal nudity from Olmos as he prances around a beach is too much for you (it almost was for me), consider this a warning.
The setting and and story for Wolfen are pretty good. Unfortunately, the casting and the special effects are seriously lacking. What are supposed to be gory death scenes now look dated. Although a fine actor, Albert Finney was not a good match for the role. Plus, in the climactic attack sequences the shapeshifters assume the shapes of… well, ordinary wolves. The movie establishes the superhuman strength and savage nature of the deaths well in advance, so when the killers turn out to be what look like ordinary wolves, it can seem a little anti-climactic.
Which brings to me to how this movie is begging for a re-make. Now that special effects have caught up, this movie could easily be fixed and re-made with a heavy dose of big, savage, computer generated Wolfen-creatures. Not wolves, but wolf-like monsters.
Now, that obscure factoid I alluded to… in 1987, you may remember seeing little grey alien heads everywhere. Remember? Every book store you went to was hawking the novel Communion by Whitley Strieber. It prominently featured the face of a grey alien on the cover. I remember it because I had to straighten the damn books when I worked at Target in high school. And Communion was high on the “I must fuck with this book” list for our customers I guess.
Communion was pitched by Strieber as a true story of alien abduction, his account of being personally abducted by aliens. It gave a serious boost to UFO culture and re-awakened the abductee phenomena. But, from the outset, there were those who were skeptical. Some even alleged that Strieber’s novel should not be taken as a true story of alien abduction, because Strieber was an established writer, and published novelist. He was a master storyteller. Indeed, he even had one of his novels turned into a movie. That movie was Wolfen.
*** Three Stars
Posted in 1981, Three Star Rating | No Comments »
